Soul in the Stone

Theatres of Triumph: The Architecture of the Epic, Mythic Ballparks of American Baseball History

Aug 24, 2025

00:01

So, I was trying to find the right image for this one, but I don't know if there is a right image. I don't know if there is an image that can actually sum this up. The concept and the idea is — let me pull up the notes, it's a little more disorganized today…

Theatres of Triumph: The Architecture of the Epic, Mythic Ballparks of American Baseball History. And this, for me, is just kind of hard to get at. Because it's trying to sum up the most material thing, right — in terms of the architectural history of American baseball… but in the most immaterial way — in terms of what these theatres represent as coliseums of spiritual striving and the attempt to self-overcome, to create triumph, manufacture triumph.

01:06

I was at a baseball game, a Mets game, a couple of days ago.

And there's something to — you step into the terrain of the baseball stadium as an architectural object, space, phenomenon — and it actually transforms the real. It's like you're entering into epic space and epic time, mythic space and mythic time. And a lot of that has to do with the way that these ballparks are constructed.

Nationals Park, where the game was, is a great example. It's carved into the ground like a traditional Greek theater. It's underground, it's submerged. Almost like an archaeological dig site.

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And I think that says a lot psychologically in terms of stepping into the mythic unconsciousness, quite literally. You're stepping into the underground, the American political underground or the underworld of history — where the psychic, mythic, and epic dramas of history occur. They play out upon the stage of history. The psychological tempests of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The inner psychic brewings of change and transformation and repressed and suppressed and hidden consciousness brought to light upon the stage of history.

03:25

Again, this is the idea, both in terms of sound… a lot of the reasons why the Greek bowls were carved into the earth for theater was for the projection of sound; in terms of vision, sight. Of consciousness looking down and peering in upon the mythic container of the submerged subconscious; the mythic, incarnate ground of human being — down across the ages and the temporal container of evolutionary time; deep time of the primordial unconsciousness.

There's that deeper sort of excavation of the unconscious element to the architecture of such places and environments. So I was thinking about Muehlebach Field, of the Kansas City Monarchs — as well as Yankee Stadium. The necessity of these architectures… both of those were actually constructed by an engineering company from Ohio, called Osborn Engineering.

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They were the architectural firm that designed and developed these stadiums. Yankee Stadium, the original one, always really catches me because of the awnings. The grand scale reminds me a lot of the old world theaters or the opera houses that you would see even in isolated small towns in Germany. You also see those in isolated small towns in the United States of America from the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s quite striking. Even in the midst of seeming agrarian simplicity, you have these epic, ornate theatres: carved in gold and depicting ancient mythic rites of old.

Polo Grounds is another great example of that kind of architectural phenomenon. To me — that grand epic style architecture, that very ornate kind of carved marble style, whether or not that carved marble style is… I've described this — whether or not that style is actually marble or whether it's steel or metal or wood, it's meant to symbolize a descent into the creative unconsciousness. It's meant to set the stage for the epic drama that's meant to unfold upon the field proper.

3:48

When we think about the architecture of baseball history, we're really thinking about what remains. We're thinking about the remnants of baseball in real time that persist. That's something to me that is rare — because when we would be talking about artifacts previously or relics, we're talking about photos or baseball cards — paper ephemera for the most part.

The fragility of those artifacts and objects but also the survival factor of that materium. When we look into the future, again, to gesture towards the Greek mythological and civilizational history, what we excavate and what we are excavating are the ruins, the architectural ruins: whether that's marble or steel or metal. Potsherd; hard, dense forms of information storage; even scrolls protected by hard bound coverings and sheathes.

What persists even past demolition; what marks space and time tends to be these the most dense fields of information, which are stone, which are metal.

These are the industrial handicraft of modern America. They're the modern American political theaters — I would argue much more so than the traditional artistic or cultural theaters in terms of how we usually know the name of theater itself. But rather: the athletic and sporting theaters of the Roman Colosseum.

These spaces that loom large, particularly in the early modern American metropolitan environments, symbolize the space that's been carved out in political time or existential time for the mythic drama; the epic drama of being human — which really cuts to the quick and carves to the essential moment, the spot, the fabric of what it means to be alive.

6:00

We discussed this with Joe DiMaggio and the concept of his work ethic on the field and what it meant symbolically for a young child to witness him play; to go all out in every game and on every pitch, because it might be the last time someone watches him. He is standing in and for the mythic heroic drama of becoming human; the mythic heroic drama of striving, striving towards greatness, and the quality, meaning, and reason of being, proper — which is a creative excellence, the virtue of humanity.

So when you descend into these mythic stadiums and you witness, as in the regular process of the baseball game — you're witnessing athletes who are at the top of their craft, striving towards perfection. Each and every pitch, each and every at-bat, each and every swing is a polishing and a harnessing and a perfecting of that technique, a perfecting of that craft.

What we're witnessing is really the best of humanity. We're witnessing the sharpening of the blade of the spirit or of the soul through this honing… the perpetual honing of the craft of baseball, which stands in stark contrast to a lot of our political, social, economic, and cultural structures — which really are not dedicated towards that kind of spiritual striving. They're dedicated instead towards the accumulation of profit or the undercutting or the exploitation or manipulation of natural resources or people or the materials of the fabric of our societies and our cultures and our civilizations.

These are the things that are destructive forces that precipitate the end of ages and the end of empires… which is what's so fascinating about baseball architecture.

I would say, again — particularly regarding Yankee Stadium, the original one — is that it's constructed in such a clear and specific way in terms of the mythic architecture and awnings and the ornate inscription on these awnings in terms of the design material… to suggest that you're entering into that epic space and epic time and sort of the forge of the destination of the soul.

And this is what is so captivating to me, I think, specifically about American baseball stadium architecture — is that what remains of these stadiums, right, and what will remain beyond blueprints or beyond photographs, is the witnessing of this epic field of play, which is really, it's a change in the signature of space and time due to the way that these stadiums are constructed. They're constructed beforehand to enable the expression of this epic drama, particularly in terms of the ornate carving out of these spaces, especially the professional baseball spaces.

They are themselves a dramatic architecture. So if you think of maybe a sandlot baseball game, that might be evocative of some pastoral element or pastoral quality, as well as a stickball game, baseball game. An idyll. But when you look at the ornate architectures of these professional stadiums, the ornate architectures of these stadiums are a precipitation, a witnessing, a predestination; an arrival into this mythic and epic time due to the sheer nature, the mass of them, the way that they're designed. The way that the seats slope into the bowl of the stadium; particularly the awnings — the architecture of the awnings and the grandstands.

10:18

There's a common kind of metaphysical structural theme to these professional stadiums. Again, Osborn Engineering constructed, I think, over 100 early modern stadiums… including many of, if not most, of the early professional baseball architectures — including the two we mentioned — Muehlebach Stadium, which the Kansas City Monarchs played in, as well as Yankee Stadium.

We're looking at a mythological metaphysical structuring, which again goes back to the Greek theater: the bowl carved into the earth and the seating that's carved gradually down towards the field of play or the theater itself.

That process itself is a way of organizing a witnessing, but again, also in terms of the sound quality and the sound dynamic, creates a field of information — a sonic and visual field of information, a perspective of information — as an objective bystander looking down or looking upon the field of play, and as such, gaining the sense of an objective observer witnessing this epic drama unfolding down upon and in the field itself. This is consciousness witnessing the soul, the root, looking down and in upon the drama of the incarnate history of evolution and the rising of consciousness as a phenomenon of witnessing life and existence itself. This is the Job quality common to the evolution of the perceptual mechanism; of nature witnessing itself.

11;46

The carving of these grandstands — I think the best way to put it is acting or being an actor in an operatic theater — is that you're stepping onto the stage in the function of the baseball player therein… as we've discussed in terms of the modern epic drama of baseball and what it means spiritually, to perform a mythological function of self-overcoming through striving towards spiritual excellence through striving towards the honing of the craft; the perfecting and polishing of the diamond through the self, of the self, with the self.

The material of the human being is being honed and sculpted through this craft and discipline, and the audience is learning this lesson through the participation in this unfolding as witness to the story of the season and the epic, mythic dramas of the human beings — all whom which have personal lives and histories — who come and go from these diamonds; these mythic spaces, such as Yankee Stadium, and perform this process of mythic overcoming, self-overcoming.

13:01

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium are two of some of the biggest, right? Mickey Mantle as well. These figures… Joe DiMaggio… these figures who are resonances, they're archetypal resonances within the larger mythic structure of the stadium construction itself, being the epic, mythic quality of the public archive and spiritual legacy of elite, professional baseball itself in historical practice at large.

Outside of these stadiums… there's a great picture of Jackie Robinson walking away from Ebbets Field in civilian clothes.

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There's this sense that you step onto the diamond and you don this uniform, right? These uniforms that themselves have a mythic and epic history of self-overcoming. Yankees, Dodgers, etc. Kansas City Monarchs — great example.

You have these uniforms themselves that are ways of entering into epic and mythic space and time. It's a transportation of the everyday human, such as the civilian clothes or the streets themselves, where a game of stickball, for instance, would take place. It's a transformation of these typical urban or industrial spaces into epic, mythic space and time.

It's a way of transfiguring the ground of existence itself through the creative construction and the architecture of these stadiums: creating a space not unlike, again, a church or a temple — wherein there's a transactive substitution of a deeper possibility and field of meaning than just beyond the everyday. This is the body and the blood, the bread and the wine. A symbolic, sacrimentation of the human body and of existence proper within the larger web and network of energetic transformation; a spiritual devotional act of metabolism, energy, thermodynamics, light, and energy toward the mythic theatre of baseball. The world is made creative, artistic symbol — through which the state and status of being is transmuted and transmogrified toward the eternal, infinite nature and status of play.

14:43

This itself was very much so a part of the old world architecture of early modern America.

That's something that you would witness in many small towns, including small mining towns and coal towns. Much of that is still there. It's an old world epic and mythic vision of humanity that is so baked into the architectural sensibilities that can be traced back to early, early Europe, really — in the sense that architecture itself was a sacred space that held transformative possibility in the way that it was constructed to be a space in which human beings… the space itself would change the way that human beings perceived reality. It was a space that itself was a sort of a theater of consciousness and a theater of vision and perception, which enabled different forms of mythic and epic time to emerge from the subconscious — that architecture would assist in structuring reality in order to allow human beings to perceive the real existential stakes, the soul level and spiritual level stakes of existence itself. Architecture in this pre-modern sense was the construction of ritual space-time; a manifestation of the eternal dynamics of the soul in historical-material space and form. A ‘drawing-out’ of the dynamics of the psyche and self realization upon the plane of reality. This is the spiritual, base and foundational creativity that is essential to and foundational to the ethics and realization of the human essence and the human soul.

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16:16

This is an instinct that's been lost to the ruthlessly modernizing impulse of industrial capitalism, which strips away everything to a sort of brutal, empty soullessness in the very rigorous streamlining of existence, the template of hyper-materialistic reality. A total economy of forms; the forgetfulness of spirit.

This is the minimalism that emerges in the mid-1950s. You witness that in a lot of Soviet architecture, as well as a lot of the avant-garde literature that emerges in that period of time. And what that really is, if I was just going to distill it, is the fascistic impulse of brutal efficiency, economic efficiency — which emerges from this false drive towards progress as political power, not spiritual evolution and revolution; self realization — as the true stakes of being human.

It's a drive towards progress which is so far and away from epic mythic time — which is the site of real progress. It's the pre-modern progress of the revelation of the soul and self-realization native to the early agrarian, native mythic conscious de-coupled… into a progress of ruthless, brutal material efficiency — in terms of consumption and production of material, and then therein, ‘profit’, so to speak, in terms of capital.

You're looking at a radically different ontology of being that is emerging through these industrial shifts, this movement toward an industrial modern reality; out of the mythic epic time of the old world.

17:39

And baseball stadiums, in many ways, are the last remnants of this epic mythic time… due to the emergence of the baseball stadium as a phenomenon in the early 1900s with Ebbets Field, Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, etc.; the perpetuation of this form — this metastructural form of spiritual, architectural space-time throughout history — as a continuation really of a sacred tradition of the epic of the soul that is within baseball in a sort of hidden esoteric way, a way that the stadium itself actually enables.

So without these stadiums, you don't have the same epic grand quality of the unfolding of something mythic and sacred. If these stadiums themselves are fields — which implies the flat ground, right, maybe there might be a couple of bleachers behind the field… — but this is all, it's a level perception and a level vision, you lose the epic quality of the risen or the heightened objective observer down upon the field of play where the epic drama is playing out. Again, in the way of an old opera theater or an in-person dramatic theater itself.

This infrastructure, this architecture itself, much like the old world architecture that's visible in these small towns in America that are frozen in time, so to speak — from the early 1900s and the late 1800s… as well as a great deal of European architecture from more towards the 1700s and earlier — you look at that architecture and really what you're doing is you're entering into an experience. The architecture itself as a formative experience of stepping into the mythic reality in the material world. A crossing of the threshold in and of the body into the eternal. The monumental. The soul level time of the eternal. The epic struggle and strife; striving and triumph.

19:46

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The Sistine Chapel might be really the foundation of what we're speaking about here in the sense of Michelangelo's construction of the Judgment as an entire field of visual information.

You step under this great dome and you witness this epic unfolding from below, which is an interesting juxtaposition, as opposed to the field of play for baseball — in terms of the bowl of the stadium and the grandstands — where you witness from above. You're witnessing this mythic, spiritual, abstracted, metaphysical event of the gods and history and this thing that is occurring in the sky; entangled with human-appearing forms. This thing which is spirit — as opposed to in the bowl of baseball and you're witnessing from above… the bowl of baseball is the soul.

You're witnessing this human struggle, this human spiritualization of the cultivation of virtue and discipline through the striving and the honing of the craft of baseball on the ground, in the dirt; entangled in the immediacy of the material, the embodied, incarnate survival in the stadium of steel — which retains the mythic, epic, old world architecture. That very same mode you see in the Sistine Chapel: suggesting an entry into mythic space-time or the vertical plane of the spirit being above and the soul being below, as opposed to the horizontal plane of the marketplace; ephemeral, material realities of the appearances of forms and temporal beings.

So the loss of the perception of the vertical plane of reality is characteristic of modernity. The vertical plane which is the mythic, spiritual plane of existence — in which we are doing the real existential work of being human; the transformative experience of encountering the depths of the soul and the heights of spirit. The realm of mystics and sages and the honing of discipline through the craft — which is in the earth; of the earth. Of material and incarnation and density, the three-dimensional. It is the work and task and forge of incarnation. Of diamonds from coal; of gold from base. The forge of spirit doing work through and in the density of form. The work is here; present; embodied on the lowest plane of density. The transmutation and transmutative act of spiritual evolution; revolution of the soul.

The loss of that plane — the vertical plane of existence — is the death of meaning… because then you're living in this horizontal desert wherein there's no transformation, there's no transfiguration, there's no evolutionary perception.

There's no evolutionary perception of the ground of reality and no transformation of consciousness. And this is a hollowed out field of empty nihilism and political bureaucracy and the making of material profit; the extending of riches to replace human, spiritual, existential meaning. A and the real meaning of life that provides real bread, spiritual bread and substance to the world. Not by merely; the sheer form of bread alone.

T.S. Eliot, ever the prophet of modernity — called this the Wasteland, populated by Hollow Men.

22:25

So when you see that transformation, these fields of transformation… early modern baseball fields, particularly sites like Yankee Stadium — you're really looking at a spiritual architecture. A spiritual architecture that is — in a very subtle way (maybe not so subtle… again, just the epic quality of Yankee Stadium or Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds) — you're watching modernity metabolize this old world religious and spiritual instinct which was not even necessarily confined to churches and temples… but was a large part of the way that cities and towns themselves were constructed.

The modern consciousness, metabolizing this architectural spirit — this metastructural spirit of epic and mythic space-time — and inserting it and impregnating the quality of baseball with that instinct and with that impulse; understanding that baseball itself was and is the field for this striving. Which, again, is not unlike the Roman Colosseum — where you witness in a very brutal way, a very violent way, the striving of humanity.

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And this was a striving more towards just survival, as a life or death proposition — with the exception of the Greco-Roman games of more athletic and sporting qualities and aesthetic contests of striving — which are not necessarily particular to these foundational Western civilizations, but a large part of them and their cultural foundations.

You see the direct translation of that Colosseum style architecture to Yankee Stadium. This trans-historical movement and transference of psychic weight and load-bearing energy suggests this awareness, at a civilizational level, that baseball was and is a refining architecture of that active, striving impulse at the spiritual level in the soul of humanity. And this is what's so powerful about baseball historical architecture and what is so enduring about it. Not just the profound density and materialization and quality of these stadiums in terms of the metal and steel (and even stone in some cases) that preserves them — with the exception, notably, of organized demolition — but their specific use and purpose of witnessing as a spiritual act of revelation.

24:55

So when you look at America, something like Yankee Stadium comes very close to, if not directly parallels, the purpose of the Sistine Chapel in Michelangelo's construction — in that it is a place of and for spiritual endurance. The baseball stadium, like the Greek theatre, is structured in a diametrically opposing way to the Sistine Chapel, in that you're witnessing the drama of the incarnate soul and density; the cultivation and the discipline through the craft of baseball in the bowl of the stadium. Whereas, in the Sistine Chapel, you're looking up.

The witnessing mechanism is different. It's the subject looking up at the objective cosmos or the metaphysical state and spiritual existence of humanity; witnessing the unfolding of this epic drama, present — yet abstracted; above, out of reach (as in God’s hand reaching from above toward Adam’s) — through the massive painting that Michelangelo performs.

But for the American consciousness, it's this within the bowl, this dug into the earth. The underworld. And then you have this grandstand witness, which again suggests to me that what has been metabolized, first and foremost, is this Roman, Greco-Roman conception of self and spiritual struggle, right — which is… it's not a Renaissance model in terms of the spiritualization of the self. It's a soul level excavation of the unconscious… and political, cultural, spiritual underground — wherein there's this striving, there's this toil, there's this struggle. It’s in the mud, in the dirt. In the flesh and in the fields of labor in which the soul and spirit and diamond of life emerges. It is in the act of embodied, incarnate struggle.

26:31

We used Jacob wrestling with the angel as an example previously; I'll allude to it again. This archetypal and existential note, which is an indelible part of the American mythic subconscious — makes America incredibly Roman and incredibly Greek. Here, in the sense that you're watching — in the tradition of Greek tragedy — a human epic drama, an incarnate spiritual drama, in which the human being is a metaphysical aperture and a lens and a process of transformation of the spirit. The human is born entropically; subject to the epic, tragic arc of the Sphinx’ riddle of time; radically transmutes the former biological and evolutionary laws of nature into an aesthetic art of political, spiritual, economic, and social triumph.

It's a radically different mode than the mythic ontologization of humanity, which I think is very specific to the Renaissance model of art that you see in El Greco, or you see in Raphael, or you see in Caravaggio — where it's a dissociation and an abstraction of the human condition into a mythic construct, a story, which is removed even in the process of painting as an imagistic separation. A dimensional divorce of access; reach of light.

You're witnessing a process unfold abstracted from reality that can't be reached or achieved experientially, looking at an archetypal story; looking into the canvas toward a metaphysical arc and mode of being. Toward an eternality which is breached by being ‘above’; relegated to abstract cosmos; gone and divorced from the human life. This is the perceptual, ontological mode of the separation of God from polis; from embodied, incarnate life and being. And thus, as such, man must go in search of God — being cast down and away from God’s presence. Again — this is a mode of perception. A way of thinking and being which is replicated in cultural circuitry and output.

27:53

But within baseball, it's a transformation and almost a perfection and profusion of the Greek tragic mode with and within the inheritor of the Roman Colosseum; the gladiatorial mode — an advancement of that instinct and impulse compounded into an understanding that the epic mythic drama of the spiritual transformation of humanity is historical; it's incarnate, it's specific, and occurs in real time. Embodied, in the flesh.

And beyond that, it itself is a cycle, a myth cycle, a transformation cycle — and it can be witnessed and observed.

Baseball creates the ground for us to witness and observe that in the American empirical mode, just through the sheer transformation of history and the process of the overturning of different epochs and eras of baseball, as well as the process of integration; the struggle of all of these different individual figures through their various different entropic and thermodynamic apertures, whether they were miners, whether they were children of slaves… there's many different kind of apertures that converge within the stadium bowl of baseball and play out this mythic epic subconscious impulse of self-transformation. The time of the body is limited, transformative; passes in and out of energetic modes of form and speech. The time of the creative, aesthetic uplifting of space-time to the mythic mode and oracular mode of spiritual consciousness through the transformation and transfiguration of the energetic force and code of the body is ether; eternal, infinite. Foundational metaphysic.

29:09

It goes beyond the Greek theater in the sense that these are not abstracted stories — but they're being witnessed in the Greek theatrical mode of the bowl of the stadium.

It goes beyond the Roman Colosseum in the sense that this is the story of individuation; this is the story of those who are honing a craft in a higher level discipline beyond the, I'll call it the bullfighting impulse, which is the violent impulse. The primordial survival instinct of life to death in ritual murder and sacrifice.

It's beyond life and death and into a spiritual chess match of refining craft. It's very non-physical and yet entirely embodied. Aesthetic transformation of will and force.

The contact is with physical objects. The process of life is transformed through physics. It doesn’t actually encounter mortality in a meaningful way. It actively seeks to be beyond mortality and into the pure craft of almost disinterested separation from material — and yet a total participation in it — which is a very sophisticated form of athletics.

30:20

Again, very little physical contact with individuals. Bat, ball, glove. A prosthetic removal through technologies which obscure the flesh, cover, clothe, even disguise or dress or uniform the flesh into instrumentation. A covering, or sheathe of consciousness. It’s a direct working with the laws of physics as a science of exploration of will, movement, force, mass, and power — as a disinterested, divested, aesthetic form of embodied athletic craft of science.

So you combine this sophisticated craft with the advancement of these metaphysics and metastructural concepts which exist as foundational precepts in Western civilization; the modes in which we communicate spiritual transformation. You’re looking at a beautifully advanced civilizational construct through which we can experience the epic, mythic drama of being human. And its almost an utter necessity to construct these stadiums with that epic, archetypal suggestion built into them; their architecture — because it allows for the entrance of mythic, epic time into the everyday and creates a radical severance and submergence within that bowl; within that stadium of oracular theater to perceive this reality.

Without it, you wouldn’t have this break in the suggestion of the everyday and submergence into the mythic through the architecture of the stadium. It is a gateway, much like Dante’s entrance to hell — a doorway and a gateway to the submerged, subconscious realm — built into the tectonic plates of the civilizational architecture of our metropolises.

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31:35

It’s almost like dream-time. It’s like an entrance into dream-time. The difference between waking and sleeping is that the architecture of reality functions in a radically different way.

So that’s what I got here. I think there’s some interesting stuff there. I’ll catch y’all on the next one.

The Historical Experience of the Spiritual Hypertrophy of Consciousness, Existence, and Eternity Toward Unity

Parts I & II: The Cult of Saturn: How Baseball and Mythic Culture Reveals to us the Truth of Who We Really Are & The Homeric Reality of Baseball History

Aug 27, 2025

Part I: The Cult of Saturn: How Baseball and Mythic Culture Reveals to us the Truth of Who We Really Are

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‘Spalding American BaseBall Party. Chicago vs. All America (The Game at the Pyramid.) Feb. 9, 1889.’ — P. Sebah (Cairo)

00:01

So this one will be called Transformation Within Stone, and this is kind of an esoteric continuance of that last essay we did on the architecture of the stadium, and the function of the stadium — as a sort of contrast. I'll call it a Saturnian archetype for the transformation of the soul.

As we see in various different human concepts, such as Mecca, such as Heliogabalus' regime in Rome… worshipping the stone — a black meteorite meant to represent the deity Elagabal — there is a quality, and you see this a lot in early paganism as well… and you obviously have the Egyptian pyramids are a great example of this additionally; the ancient devotional structures built around the world. Structures of stone temples.

You have this historical worship of the stone, which is the highest density, and again, as we discussed in an artifactual way, it is the longest remaining substance. So when you look at these ancient civilizations — and you're looking at the ruins of the Colosseum, or you're looking at the ruins of the ancient Greek temples, or the Mayan or Aztec structures — you're looking at that which remains the longest physically, materially on earth. We're looking at the history of mountains, for instance. The Black Hills of the indigenous Americas; the Sacred Hoop of stars above.

These forms of stone were historically worshipped as entities most proximal with immortality. And the reason why stone and metal and these highly dense material forms are so important in the juxtaposition to what occurs within them is that these are the Saturnian substance of the structure of reality. They symbolize an eternal archetypal play. But what goes on within these Saturnian structures, such as the stadium, or the temple, or the pyramid — or the body, or the form, or the Earth itself as a geological rock and appearance of stone — is the drama of the eternal transformation of the human soul; the world soul, which is the immortal mortality, so to speak. Even hid within the Earth is the molten core of fire. Heat from its formation; radioactive decay from within its very mantle. The metabolic forge, force, and source.

2:28

So the figures that I would speak of now are Satchel Paige, Jack Quinn, Babe Ruth, and Walter Johnson — and specifically Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson's final battle in the early 1940s that was raising money for World War II. A duel between perhaps one of the greatest pitchers and greatest hitters of all time. An event that drew almost 70,000 fans to Yankee Stadium to witness this history unfold.

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Babe Ruth facing Walter Johnson

The final battle that occurs… and Babe Ruth hits his last home run. Both of them are long retired at this point.

This is the idea of time and entropy, and the game of baseball in the stadium as a container, like a mountain or a geological monument of time as the field of eternal movement of life and play. Of the rise and fall of forms, forces, myths, epics, and legends of metabolic transformation; genetic transfusion; the rise and fall of generations, organisms, species — in the unfolding of the grand time scale of the evolution of the universe; even locally, of the genetic saga of planet Earth.

This idea of remaining on the field of creation and remaining within this immortal eternal stadium… and being identified with the universal, the eternal action and movement of play as the creation of the cosmos, even in entropy and even in time. And furthermore, baseball as this method of keeping time.

3:31

So I want to talk a little bit about the historical function of Saturn worship; stone worship, such as Mecca or the pyramids, or the Mayan or Aztec temples. The key thing to note here is the difference between worship of the form, or the form as the house of worship. Whether it is the appearance of the form — that the stone itself is being worshipped from the outside as a container of opacity, or a thing in and of itself, an object… or that the stone itself is entered, as in a step into incarnation by consciousness — into density, into form — and that the stone itself becomes a/the vehicle for the discovery of the hidden ontology of transformation and the source and essence of all being and existence itself. In this way the stone is the process of incarnation as a revealing of the psyche of the cosmos; is not remained from the outside. It is entered into as an experience, like Dante and Virgil entering into the geological firmament of the Earth and descending into the bowels of the stone and the mountain of the planetary geology to uncover the truth and essence and source of all being. This is the spiritual journey of consciousness into existence. We must go within.

The historical temples of stone: these are all world historical, world civilizational, cosmological structures of reality. They themselves are the house and form of the metaphysical discourse of the human soul; the field into which we step to play out the theatre and drama of all of creation. This, in the most direct and immediate sense, is the body.

And the reason that they're all made out of stone, or that they resemble mountains, or that they themselves work as this epic container of materiality and dense materiality… You think of stone as a highly dense, heavy, weighted mass and force that remains, right? It holds within itself something. It structures so that the existence of something can be incarnated; thrown into the field of being and withstand experience even as other fields, forces, and forms form in the forge of the still of creation. The body itself is a field that is maintained by a molecular discourse. Held together by compound, corporeal molecular bonds. It is a communication, a hidden agreement; a code of being developed, built, constructed over time by the intelligence, the machine learning of the universe. It builds and has built something to house itself in order to experience itself; witness itself, even as it unfolds and absconds otherwise…

4:09

Even as the human flesh undergoes entropy and corrodes and decays and creates and decreates, you have these eternal structures — which are the containers for the epic play of the spiritual journey of transformation of humanity. The stone remains. The stone that is carved, painted, built — Lascaux, Giza, Yankee Stadium. The desecration of temples as an imperative of iconomachy, as civilizations and religious orders overthrow the decrees of one another. An imperative to build and destroy the same principle through a different aperture, a different interpretation of the same metaphysical phenomenon of stone… over and over again. The rise and fall of these civilizations is an existential repetition of interpretation of an eternal precept.

And these are very sacred containers — these stone replications and symbolizations and ritualizations of the body and form of the universe and cosmos — because they perform the key mythological, societal and cultural functions of containing the deep spiritual reality, and the existential reality and drama and theater of being human, as it unfolds on the cosmological stage of the universe.

And even the Earth functions in this sense archetypally. It is the archetypal, archeological meta-container for the interplay of souls and human souls on this Earth. This is our ‘history’, woven into the very stone and fabric of the body and breadth of the massive genealogy and geography of the planet itself as an inscription, a form of living writing of the evolution of the cosmos itself.

4:47

So we have, historically — humanity exists in a Saturn cult. And the reason why I use that term is that the Saturn cult is a cult of immortality. It is the cult of the eternal perseverance of forms which are meant to be born and be borne away into death and dying. Dissolution. Revolution. Evolution.

[]

‘Saturn Eating His Son’ - Francisco Goya

You look at this in terms of early alchemy, you look at this in terms of the journeys of kings and conquistadors — many, if not all of whom sought immortality. To continue their reign and pursuit of power. To remain in this body and form eternally.

The idea of the fountain of youth, for instance. There's so many historical instances of people who seek power — and what they're really seeking in terms of power in the material world, the three-dimensional Saturnian dense physical world — is that they're seeking immortality, a way to continue forward being identified with the body. In juxtaposition, you have the historical figure of the Buddha — inheritor to the throne of power, the throne of materiality and control — who leaves the kingdom and the castle walls; walks among the poor and disenfranchised; starves under the bodhi tree to find the true and real meaning of life, the foundation and essence of all existence as in enlightenment and eternity. He relinquishes all. The body, the form, the appearance of riches — to perceive the truth.

5:31

The sage or the mystic who performs this function — in the temple or in the mountain, the mountain caves where Hindu sages would sit and meditate, or the path of Christ, where Christ enters the cave, dies and is reborn, Lazarus… — all of these different mythological principles, they enter into Saturn, they enter into the density of incarnation and transform through it.

They don't remain tethered to the body or tethered to the appearance of form. They find within the incarnation, within the density, the eternal source of all life itself, which is the primordial spark of existence — which is the transformer within all stars, and is the transformer of the universe itself, going all the way back to the creation of this universe, the Big Bang, or whatever sort of name you want to apply to the frictive event which created a heat density expansion… which is the formation of the continuing and turning complexity and expanding of the various different forms that appear within the universe itself. We're talking about the thermodynamic thermonuclear essence of all life, through which in the transformer of stars as a metaphysical thermonuclear forge itself creates different elemental forms, which then recombine and are the building blocks and structure of reality itself.

So you see this replicated in Egyptian pyramids; you see this replicated in Greek temples, you see this replicated in the bricks that build and construct cities and towns and houses, you see this replicated in the creation of the modern baseball stadium. These are all different world historical ways and forms of resonating with that Saturn process of construction with the building blocks of life. These building blocks of life are essential to experience reality and existence. They are the house of the body, the house of the soul of the form. But the soul of the form is the true home; the true source through which power and heat and light and energy radiate. The house is a vessel for perception. An aperture for the perception of the eternal. The form as a staircase into which we descend to see the descent itself — the nesting doll of eternity into ephemerality; the return of the house to the home of the infinite.

This even goes down to genetics, the genetic construction of the interweaving of different chemical compound forms which are themselves the building blocks of the information of life itself on Earth. The interweaving of the genetic code which forms and informs the continual creation of the human being and life on Earth through reproduction. The process of creation, destruction and creation through destruction, which again is the sexual recombination of the life of an organism.

7:56

So that Saturn archetype runs very deeply in humanity — and it ultimately is a Saturn wound — because you're identifying with the form itself and seeking to perpetuate that form eternally and thus remaining imprisoned or in-prismed in terms of the prism or the aperture of perception of the body. To remain within that forever, which is… it's a naturally corroding and corrosive force through entropy just through thermodynamic physics. The very nature of the body is it's meant to exist for a period of time, it's experienced, it's observed by the universe and then it returns to this formless cloud of gases and ash and then is like stars, the death of a star creates a cloud of ash, right? This is the transformative principle. Existence itself continues to naturally change and transform and experience new apertures. The fear of death as in transformation of the essence of existence and being as a cosmological, primordial energy of all things is the Saturnian cult of immortality.

A cloud of the death of the old form of the star and then through that cloud a new star is actually born. So this principle again goes right back to Christ in the cave and it is so… it resembles a lot of the ancient Venusian myths such as — we discussed — the descent of Inanna and the descent of Persephone into hell, which is the Plutonic realm.

[]

The goddess Inanna

So when we talk about Pluto we're talking about the transformative essence of all life. We're talking about the real source, the change agent, the actual force of the heat of the will of the universe itself which is the creationary force and power of all existence that is pregnant within the density of all appearing and seeming things.

When you have historical Hindu sages, for instance, saying — do not identify with the body, the body is ephemeral, who are you actually? What are you actually?

They're asking you to find the source of all consciousness and existence, the state of awareness which is the creationary force and power of the universe itself. They're asking you to identify with that. And so what's so powerful in terms of baseball history when you look at Satchel Paige or Jack Quinn or Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson, you're looking at this continued eternal return to the game even through the process of entropy and the corrosion of the human form. Through the stripping away of the mortal powers, the spirit or the soul of the form, the consciousness and awareness behind the person is identified with the state of play and the creation of the epic rite of the game itself. It is identified truly with the immortality of the cosmic, immortal, cosmological process of creation itself — beyond all names and forms. Directly embodied and incarnate into that state of active play.

10:06

They return to the participation in this epic play and creation within the stadium. The stadium itself as the structure that holds this power, this impulse, this instinct. It houses and demarcates space for this mythic, existential impulse as a direct creation to the soul of the universe itself. The ritual temple; the house of being. They return continually, throughout their lives. Paige and Quinn both pitch well into their 50s; Paige into his 60s. Saturnino Minoso — so interesting and aptly named; the first black Cuban major leaguer — too, played well into his 50s.

Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson return for this sort of last ride as a fundraiser for World War II and have this kind of one last final duel, both of them at this point being well-aged out of the professional game. There is a deep subconscious recognition in the baseball public at the time of what this means; the power of this moment. A final duel; a last stand.

[]

An Illustrated Current News newsstand poster documenting the final match between Ruth and Johnson.

What it symbolizes is this powerful, powerful creational impulse to return to the site and source and mechanism of play itself — and baseball being in this way the most powerful metaphysical vision of creation, reality, and existence… beneath all of the different mechanisms that perpetuate life: such as reproduction, such as food, metabolism. These being the primary ontological forces and thrusts of human life and existence as a perpetuation and maintenance of form. The undergirdings which are the biological and chemical foundations of existence which perpetuate the life of the organism. Ruth and Johnson both, in this moment, are in — and reifying, dormantly, to the American cultural and mythic subconscious — a state of metaphysical connection to the game of baseball as a state of play. And as such, a higher teleology of the possibility and meaning of life and existence as a cosmological phenomenon of the totality of creation as the real substance of all form and being.

Again, Heraclitus says the Aion or the eternity is a child playing with colored balls. It couldn't be more precise. The analog there I believe just most directly translates to the planets or the solar system itself — and that the Aion is the force of physics and the force of gravity and the force of force itself as the star system which holds these planets in alignment as they move and spin. It is the primordial will of all of creation; the physics therein are the mechanisms of play at play. The dance of forms in relation; the dance of forms in relativity as a sphere of movement, change, and relationship via their status and perennial state of change. This itself, is the form, force, and body of the universe — a bodiless body which contains all bodies proper.

[]

Motion of the solar system relative to the galactic center

11:56

This very much so being the force of will applied to baseball — which is the power and the perpetual motion behind the movement of the baseball itself in and at scale. The force of the pitcher's hand in motion and the force of the batter's swing and the connection of the bat and the ball then you have to feel they're going to make that play and make the catch.

It's a microcosm, macrocosm relation of the foundational metaphysics of the cosmos itself in terms of solar systems and star systems which themselves are the galaxies which form the universal network and web of all existence.

It's a foundational microcosmic awareness and situating of that principle within everyday life as a cultural mechanism which connects existence directly with the truth of all being. It's very profound in this way because we're talking about the appearance of forms being a sort of cultural trap or falsity through which so much of human existence becomes caught up in… becomes caught up in attempting to achieve immortality or power through the appearance of forms and sustaining forms as a site of power — when in reality, the transformation or the change mechanism, the Plutonic hidden within the appearance of existence, within the appearance of Saturn… that itself is the transformative force which is who we really are and what we really are. It's the force of change creation and play which occurs in the site of the Saturnian. It is the primordial, existential, universal; metaphysical truth that occurs within the appearance of reality.

It occurs in the site of the temple or the pyramid or the geological substratum of the earth.

[]

Willie Mays’ ‘The Catch’

13:34

So when we talk mythically or mythologically about a figure like Dante and the inferno cycle which he creates, it's literally… what it's describing is a descent into the bowels of the earth or a descent into incarnation, the descent of spirit into form — and thus holding sway in a Saturnian realm of density and materiality and the appearance of things. Satan itself in Dante’s hell is the root of the sine wave, the depths of the im-prism-ment… the incarnation of the deepest most frozen, glacial density and heaviness, rootedness, fixity of form. And the acts that one commits in a conviction of the form as truth, not the soul within it. The awareness, the vision, the perceiver — not the perception, or that which is a vehicle for it. The self, hid beneath all of the vestements and sedimental cloths of the body of the earth; the body of the form of being. The cloth. The vessel. The veil.

A descent into that mode; that sedimentary bowels of the earth — the cosmological body — to discover the ontology of the soul, to discover the self pregnant within materiality and to retrieve that self, return with that self up to the site of existence, the horizontal plane; and to participate in existence with that hidden sacral knowledge of the reality and the truth of being beneath the appearance of material things. To know that, in the Gnostic sense, that which forms the deepest essence of incarnate, physical, dense and material nature — is that same source of the eternal lightness of spirit and spiritude. The immaterial; the embodiment are one and the same. Beneath the ephemeral is the eternal hidden within the soul of the form.

[]

'Orpheus and Eurydice’ - Emil Neide

This is, again… this is the the Orphic function in ancient Greece. It’s Orpheus descending into hell to find Eurydice and to bring Eurydice back up into the light of day, returned from death, right? Orpheus’ music itself, his lyre — is playing the bands of the sine of creation itself. He is the musician in the universal sense as an archetype — the artist who bends the ear and voice of nature. Who bends the time and sine-waves of sound. Sound being the vibrational structure, pattern, and system of form — that which holds together and breaks apart as a resonance structure of the patterns of existence — which themselves are temporary molecular forms; cognitive structures of the universe, entwined as fields of information — fields of information which come together in resonance fields; break apart. He, like Shiva, symbolizes the heroic architecture of being itself — the bridge between the immaterial wholeness of the universe itself; the appearance of forms. The music of being itself is the transistor; the translator — of the hidden, sacral, esoteric nature of the interconnected web and network of all existence — first in the primordial fire of the will and the motion of being therein as a relative dance of bodies of forms in relation. All is one at root within them; the veil is their form — the soul is their eternal, primordial substance.

14:45

The soul of form as it appears in the world is a materiality of death. It’s a flat plane of ephemeral things that come and go and nothing remains. The marketplace at which Christ rebels; turns the tables of the moneychangers; castigates them before the house of God.

[]

‘Christ Expelling the Moneylenders’ – Albrecht Durer

This is the spiritual and cultural nihilism of modernity — because it's lost that epic transfusion of myth. It's lost that descent to discover the source and soul of form. We've taken form to be truth.

And this, again, is the cult of Saturn. It's the worship of stone. It's to see what is hidden within the form as opposed to worshipping the form itself, to discover that eternal source and essence of spirit and spiritude and then thus to participate in reality in a way that is authentically true to the eternal, the eternal nature of the material self.

Even as the spirit changes forms, even as the spirit changes diameters and apertures of perception, we don't remain imprisoned or imprismed in a certain perception or mechanism of form. So what's so powerful about what Satchel Paige or Jack Quinn or Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson do is they show us — through this eternal return to the game of baseball — that they're not even so much identified with the corrosion of the material self as they are identified with the game itself. The form transforms; the passion of play remains. They remain and return again to the source and essence of creation.

The practice of this profound metaphysical elucidation of the source and force of play of the creation of the universe, the play of forms and the play of bodies and the play of the appearances of materialities, this site of baseball as a trans-historical site — as a profusion of the comings and goings of different human stories, personal stories and lives as they're born and die and are born again within this stadium superstructure of stone… is itself a profoundly spiritual esoteric phenomenon of the creation. The birth and death of all things — and what remains through them is this tradition and profusion of play, the evolution of play, the creational dynamics of play which are beneath all appearing seeming seriousness of life and death and survival and existence.

16:54

This is the essential importance… you think about this Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson showdown as well as Jack Quinn or Satchel Paige or Minoso — this is all occurring around the hinge of the philosophical uncovering of not only Heidegger (in terms of the ontology of being), but you also have Camus in terms of absurdity and you have Sartre in terms of existentialism. These are all orbits of emergent comprehension that are happening around this period of the 1930s to the 1950s and 60s, which actually is the hinge of World War II — and it's also when the planet Pluto is discovered in the sky, officially so to speak. February of 1930.

You could say that ancient civilizations and esoteric philosophers knew about Pluto because they knew about this transformative change process.

[]

Pluto

It's even, again, pregnant within the Greek and Roman mythologies and mythological concepts — as well as the esoteric myths which structured these civilizations… but it's quote-unquote found astronomically as a astronomical cosmological body in the sky exactly and precisely at this period of time.

So we're talking about the absolute heights of popularity of baseball at this moment of time in American history. The 1930s, 40s, and 50s are considered the golden age of baseball when it's reached its absolute heights of popularity in America as a cultural phenomenon and as a replication of the American spiritual process of transformation. A discovery of this deeper hidden ontology of the foundations of existence; the transformative nature — as Heraclitus again says, you can never step in the same river twice. This is the first generational evolution and revolution of the astronomical body consciousness of the existence of Pluto as a material and formal planetary force in the larger ecosystem of the cosmos vis-a-vis the perceptive, experiential encounter beyond the abstract body of the myth. The incarnate form and function.

This moment… the transformative nature and essence of the existence of being beneath the appearance of forms and the crisis, the existential crisis that occurs in modernity in this discovery of the emptiness or the hollowness — as T.S. Eliot would put it — of material existence and the hyper-fascistic impulses which compel this profound survival instinct that is embedded so deeply within our politics, within our cultures, and within our sociality, so to speak.

19:15

So what baseball does is it recalls for us… back to this Greco-Roman conception which is itself deeply tied to ancient Hinduism. The discourse there is profound, as well as ancient Egypt, in discussing the profound journey and struggle of finding the soul within form and how we materialize that as a cultural or civilizational rite of participation in existence which necessarily must transcend the biological chemical perceived bounds of being human and achieve a deeper existential perception of what being human means in a larger cosmological sense. It must become higher; evolve; as such, humans might become in tune with the truly divine; incarnate the divine upon Earth with right consciousness and right awareness. With wisdom. With the spirit of philosophy and inquiry into truth and the nature of things.

We must in this way free ourselves from this ancient cult of Saturn worship which is the nihilistic worship of form, the worship of ephemerality — and then as such total indulgence in things which are shadows… flickers of their appearances; glitterings of a deeper gold… veils of truth, veils of fire upon the walls… projected upon the cave — as the metaphor of Plato's cave avails us.

Shadows upon the wall of existence, this ephemeral worldly form and body — which beneath and through it we comprehend the sacral truth… we comprehend through it. Through the tools of vision.

But we ourselves are not perceiving the sun of existence. This is our modern existential dilemma and drought of the water of life; the soul of the truth of being and existence.

20:23

We're not perceiving the source and force of cosmic will which impels and changes forms of all things down through the cosmological nesting doll of existence itself — down through the Big Bang, down through the forms of stars which are forges that create the elements that then become bonded and compounded… and then from that substratum form single-celled life that evolves and mutates… and then again coagulates and compounds into newer different more complex forms of existence… with more complex nervous systems or organ systems and brains.

So we're looking at an evolutionary process which descends from this cosmological nesting doll formation. And there's been, historically, an intuitive apperception of this scientific and cosmological reality, which is the historical metaphysics that founds our ancient civilizations and our ancient cultures and the great works of our ancient philosophical writers and thinkers — who then avail humanity of a real existential spiritual perception of what it is and means to be human. Beyond, really, the slavery to Saturn, slavery to stone as stone to form — and as such, you're acting out, unconsciously, the eternal return to the body and identification with the body and all of these different biological and chemical compellings — which are really just survival mechanisms which exist to continue to scaffold humanity and nature on top of itself. To live entirely in survival and to die unknowing of the root and wellspring of the soul as the eternal truth of all things and nature.

These basic natural processes… which themselves are life in an indubitable foundational way — but they are life that is identified with the form of the body as the body is the nature to transform. It's the nature to change. So to find that deeper nature to change within the self and within the body is to descend within incarnation and to participate in this eternal dance, in this eternal art of play and creation and change. But not in an unconscious way as in a worship of Saturn. A worship of the appearance of form.

22:41

[]

Satchel Paige returns: AP Wire, 1965

So to get a little deeper into this… Paige and Quinn and Ruth and Johnson — these are all human beings — but through their participation with baseball, they acquire this eternal archetypal play in this dance of creation… in that they become so identified with the game of baseball. They become the eternal creative and creational force of existence in their devotional aesthetic action to the movement of sporting play; the craft of baseball itself. The game.

Their entire lives revolve around this participation in this epic, deeply indigenous rite of cultural play which is availed of us in the stadium architecture — the theatrical architecture of the temple or the pyramid — which are our existential rites; our metaphysical spiritual rites which connect us directly to creation in a primordial foundational way… not in a secondary way as in participation through the conventional human mechanism of metabolism reproduction etc. These are unconscious, natural elements of the perpetuation of the flue of the cosmos itself. A organismic call to the unfolding. What's necessary — through culture — is symbolic transformation of the raw material and ore of the human form of the unconscious call and form of nature; a sculpting of the apparatus and tools and techne of being-human into an active instrumental will… through which we actively create — and thus, participate in and with the foundational will of creation. We activate and become conscious of the force of will and the metabolic power and forge of the human existence itself; ally our existential lot and power of the nesting star and fabric of existence itself in direct recourse: immediately, imminently, back into the metaphysical, cosmological principles of existence as play. Play of heat, energy, light, and the pregnancy of forms with the spirit and life of the eternal.

[]

Soren Kierkegaard

It's a dialectical redoubling, to use Kierkegaard's terms — a dialectical redoubling of the force of creation. A way of holding up a mirror and reflecting upon the foundations of our very existential existence beyond the bounds of the species level form of being human and into the metaphysical superstructure of all life and creation. Into a cosmological revelation where we actually become identified with that which we actually are — the universe; the eternal… the force of creation itself.

So this is just… it's incredibly profound. But we need that cultural profusion. We need that mythological superstructure of the stadium or the temple as the fields of this sacred esoteric rite for us to become, in this way, more than human. As a theatre, as a mirror, as a aesthetic course of transmutation of the base impulses and instinctual nature of the human — to transmute the fabric and ore of our unconscious, animal, organismic being into the transcendental force and active participation directly with the a priori course and source of all energy and the universal itself. To create, in this foundational world historical art of spirit and soul — a real and profound power of unity.

For us to become ancient primordial cosmological beings — and no longer strictly identified with this template that is unconsciously availed us… this Saturn form through which we are desperate for survival and in this way animals becoming conscious — through the esoteric metaphysical symbolic ritual of identifying with the field of play in the field of creation beyond and prior to, a priori to, the creation of humanity, right — as a structure of and genetics as a structure of — evolved brain and organ and bone and blood.

To become identified with that a priori structure of the creation of the universe itself we ourselves are plugged directly back into that essential primordial substance of existence… but we need that cultural rite. We need that cultural symbolic rite to give us that form of play and that form of art which is transcendental — in the sense that it is both human and beyond human. It is through our humanity… through the mechanism of our humanity that we participate in something that is beyond human in terms of that it transcends and is transcendental of the traditional human impulse.

That in it, it transforms the traditional human impulse through the force of will creation and play into an aesthetic participation in the art of transformation which then avails us of the truth of existence directly and imminently. And we are actively participating in the truth of that existence proper.

This is the historical function of myth. It's the historical function of culture as the ground of everything important that happens in a human sense — because it allows us to become cosmological beings beyond this sort of this cloak of humanity that we wear, which is the structure of Saturn. Which is reproduction, food, survival… the animal form of the ephemeral — which necessarily must come and go. And it's a brief aperture of our experience — the perception of our experience. To plug that perceptive mechanism into the larger superstructure of a cultural rite that delivers us into this existential perception of the cosmological function of creation itself, the force of will itself… is to elevate humanity into the realm of the eternal. The realm of the cosmological whole; the universal whole, and to participate in that mythic spiritual time.

And thus, actually truly become immortal in the Plutonic sense of eternally transforming; participating in the change maker, the transformer of all existence itself — plugging into that existential primordial function of the will itself directly. Plugging into that outlet through the rite of aesthetic existence as a revelatory truth of the whole of the play of being — as opposed to circumstantially being retrofitted into it by the culture and biology of the human body itself and thus unconsciously participating in it…

We have to raise it to the form of consciousness, to the light through a cultural rite — which is the symbolic unveiling of creation proper. The force of will proper, stripped of its appearance in the lexicon of human production and reproduction and survival; thus grounded in strict, caged, im-prism-ed terms of a specific iteration of a form of being legislated by the space and time of glacial, material evolution as and of possibility.

27:55

We have to activate the force of will into the… I don't know how to describe this… as — it's activating the force of will consciously through the symbolic architecture, right, of the sport of baseball as a rite. As a stadium mechanism, a theatrical mechanism of the revelation and the awakening of being beneath the sheathes and masks of human, animal consciousness as a code of perpetuation and survival and reproduction… through which we descend into and perform a theater of creation directly through utilization of the will aesthetically.

A theater of existence which is the mythological function of all historical civilizations. A theater through which the veil is pulled back from our eyes and we experience the creation directly… through our symbolic archetypal participation in the movement of creation itself as opposed to living in this slumber of the human body and the human form — where we act out these chemical and biological directives — and as such are unconscious witnesses to this real kind of esoteric underpinning of all life and existence itself.

And this is why culture is so important and myth is so important across all world civilizations. We need that symbolic mirror through which we can perform the function of creation. We can activate the force of will through a totally aesthetic realm… in that totally aesthetic realm… that realm of the coming and going of forms this participation in the eternal structure of the stadium or the creational game or art of life — the dance and play of the Aion, the child with the the colored balls… in the grand, Aionic sense activates our perception of that which we truly are.

It raises us into consciousness of the transformative mechanism hidden within the ephemeral structures. The ephemeral forms which construct the appearance of what seems to be.

29:54

And this is the existential key. At this hinge point of modernity which is the 30s, 40s, and 50s — the golden age of baseball… World War II… and the discovery of Pluto. It’s the hinge point to see — what is deeper? Beneath all of these appearances of that which we conceive to be and have structured our modern society off of. We’ve structured our modern society in and from this hyper-material, hyper sort of anthropomorphic perception of reality. How can we use these structures that appear to be; as such we’ve invested ourselves so much in the appearance of structure that we’ve forgotten this ancient, mythic, primordial impulse which is innate to humanity — as in culture; a culture of mythic rite which allows us and performs us to descend into the real elemental truth of the will of being; that which we are — and furthermore, innate to all life as the real existential reality of the existence of being proper.

To discover the real existential form of existence. The formless form beneath the appearance. Hidden within the stone, right — the descent into form, the incarnation. Hidden within that descent is something mythic, archetypal, eternal… and changing. Eternally recurring in the form of the source itself, but changing in terms of the way that it appears to be. The way that it dies, is reborn; is born again.

So our perception of that is our ability to elevate all of life and all of existence into the realm of the mythic, the archetypal; the eternal — and thus have a transformative experience of being human itself.

31:12

That’s what I got, I’ll catch y’all on the next one.

Part II: The Homeric Reality of Baseball History

Creative Play of Forms: The Shift of Consciousness & The Hidden, Sacral Nature of Baseball Media

00:01

So this one will be called the Homeric Reality of Baseball History. And so as you may know from these other videos that we've done — my background, I started when I was 15… working at the Smithsonian American History Museum and working in the baseball archives, categorizing and cataloging historical information. Most specifically, old baseballs.

00:42

So as my work and knowledge has progressed, my foundations — I really loved studying the Negro Leagues. I really loved... the feeling of uncovering history. The sensation of remembering something forgotten; restoring history and truth.

I think that was the idea. The architecture, the hidden architecture of baseball history. From an early age, I had a big passion around it — especially vintage baseball cards. The sense that there was something kind of mythical and meaningful there. The forgotten, the uncertain; the possibility of from the material grounds of history something immense and spiritually, existentially true emerging. A meta-structure; a vision of a deeper reality undergirding all seeming play of forms and ephemerality.

01:21

And as time has progressed over the past decade and a half, I've become more of a private historian and philosopher in terms of my work.

I went deeply, deeply into science, cosmology, metaphysics; biology… the history of the universe and the structure of the universe, and what that means for humanity at an existential level. That's my background — a kind of intersection of science, philosophy, and psychology — because I see them all as interconnected phenomena. Extending from the foundations of existence in the universe itself.

I went really deeply into that for the past decade and a half; circled back around to baseball. I really just felt deeply, intuitively… to allow the unconscious architecture of baseball to emerge through my study, through my archeology and through my historical research. To let the two worlds of baseball and existential cosmology speak in unison and for something new and unexpected to emerge from their synthesis and unity.

And that archeology has really summed itself in the assembly of artifacts — whether those are artist proofs of early Negro leagues all-star games programs or half-tone photographs of early Cuban baseball history recovered in and from the Bohemia magazine archives. We've gone over a lot of this material. I've used them, to a degree, as visual aids and guides as we've gone through this journey of baseball history and the meaning of culture and mythology; how culture, rites, and mythos function at an existential and metaphysical level as a guiding of humanity in terms of meaning in the universe, right?

As an extension of meaning in the universe — and the creation of it through looking directly at the existential foundations of what it is to be human and how to participate directly in the universal imperatives of creation and play.

03:20

So as I built this archive, I noticed… the power of the unconscious historically is so fantastic. In all of this work of distilling this information and this knowledge and this historical material — not only in terms of baseball culture over the past 20 years and my work with baseball archaeology and archival curation, but then also combined with the scientific — larger deep time, deep space, cosmological perception of what it is to be human. Combining those two and just allowing it to emerge organically.

This archive as it has emerged, I understand now what was emerging is a sort of Homeric meta-structural vision of baseball as something that emerges from humanity's political, social, and cultural unconsciousness as a necessary form to articulate the conundrums of modernity as an information technology crisis of image, belief, myth, and truth — and the breaking of myth and meaning and being into the 20th century through radical integration, modernization, and globalization of human civilization. And this occurs, fundamentally and primarily — through image making technology as a simultaneously image breaking technology. The image of self, humanity, world, God, existence, and meaning.

This very technology changes the way we think about ourselves, one another, and everything. And it is processed primarily as truth visually — through archetypal existential mythologies of ancient civilizations, to AI and modern moving images on digital cell phone screens. This shifts our apertures; expands our perceptions of truth — through the light speed traveling of visual information as ‘proof’, or truth through space and time.

The confusions that emerge through globalization and industrialization are an essential part of this information transformation of the architecture of human consciousness, but furthermore, this propogation and evolution of the image itself as an ontology and mechanism is itself an articulation of a human mythic spiritual epic of consciousness. Consciousness itself — as history of world civilizations well tells us — evolves through the bardic, mythic subconscious as images and archetypes of self and world as mechanisms of envisioning reality, possibility, and relationship to God, truth, and existence. Odysseus, Orpheus, Christ, Dionysus, Buddha — these figures, both historical and mytho-archetypal — form the seed bed and underwebbing of the way we conceptualize ourselves as a locus of humanity today; how we envision our futures; our pasts, our potentialities.

04:44

And I've understood in my research, right, I would say I've specialized to this point for the most part in modern baseball. Specifically, I really did enjoy the Negro leagues and then I got deep into the Cuban leagues, the early professional Cuban leagues. The architecture of Deadball as a political and social phenomenon intersecting with industrialization in the US also interested me greatly.

Through this interweaving of historical sub-timelines within the larger evolution of baseball as an international form and web of language, I see this larger metastructural unfolding. The starting point of modernity is 1964 in Cuba with the founding of Cuban baseball and Nemesio Romaguera, and tracing the revolutionary developments that occur in Cuba. It's almost like the Battle of Troy, so to speak, that sparks the Odyssey — that revolutionary unfolding of the liberation of Cuba and the abolition of slavery in Cuba — the liberation of Cuba from Spain and the Spanish Empire into the founding of the modern Cuban nation in 1900, which coincides with and directly correlates with the integration of baseball in Cuba. 50 years before Jackie Robinson in the United States with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

05:44

I'm tracing a teleology, a narrative spine of the history of modernity in baseball — and in doing so, a myth cycle akin to the Odyssey emerges. It’s a metastructural emergence of truth in history as an evolution of consciousness only prior expressed in myth. But it is a real, historical phenomenon of the transformation of the collective political consciousness through the revelation of the subconscious via image technology; a sort of, quite literally forced integration through the expansion of truth through sensory apertures that reveal the real mechanism of the world as a cosmos; as such, force our self and identity and vision conceptions of reality to expand along with it. Like the invention of the telescope; in accord, the perceptions of Galileo and Copernicus from above; the innovations of Freud and Nietzsche from below — we are forced to reckon with emergent new mechanisms and technologies of sight… existential sight. By way of technology and the revolutions of genius — our visions of cosmology are overturned.

And perhaps technology is the great innovation of public genius — in that it evolves, overnight, our perceptual mechanisms through the democratization of access to media and information; all of the conundrums of truth and verification and narrative destabilization that come with it. The struggle for control of these outlets as power of and over knowledge. And through these radical evolutions — from the printing press to photojournalism to television to social media — the consciousness itself of the collective is shifted toward more and more forms of radical inclusion via accessibility to forms of information which span from the purely phantasmagorical to the documentarian. And as such, we must shift and sift to find that which is true beneath all appearances of truth. In doing so, we are radically destabilized towards evolution.

06:10

You emerge into 1900, and there is this influx of change. It is being captured. Baseball is becoming a mechanism of the communication of political, cultural language. It is already a radical method of cross border and cultural communication.

I have a couple of negative strikes by Northeastern State College Library in Tahlequah, Oklahoma — pieces from the American Heritage Picture Collection of the Cherokee Seminary baseball team in 1901. You're witnessing this early fomentation of a radical integration at a global level of baseball itself… including, as we discussed, the 1908 Habana Winter League team, which featured Rube Foster, Home Run Johnson, and Pete Hill in Cuba. It’s something akin to a Wild West of consciousness that the radical integration of Cuba opens up in the Western Hemisphere — a near sheer vacuum of revolutionary fervor which anticipates history; itself strikes out a vanguard to be, almost destined, to be fulfilled. This political revolution shifts the cultural aperture of the entire Western Hemisphere; the culture of baseball as its messenger.

And that's again — that 1908 Habana photo — its a picture that has been taken of what is now a lost artifact. It was already highly damaged when the picture was taken by Bohemia Magazine, to preserve and archive it. It is a photograph taken of the original photo. This was a common method of preservation during the period of time that this was taken… in the 1940s — a rapidly degrading printed image for which the original negative could not be recovered.

So that's — from to the best of the existing archival knowledge, to my understanding — it is the last remaining artifact of that photo that exists. We're talking about an emerging revolutionary consciousness that's occurring in the political underground of baseball through Cuba with black American baseball players traveling to Cuba and playing there; a consciousness being reflected upon and preserved by the national magazine in the returning revolutionary period of the mid-20th century in Cuba.

As well as school teams — which are emerging in coalition in relationship to um the very highly political process of the re-education of the Native American people in the United States. One of these methods being through baseball, as a cultural language; way of speaking and being. And later on, you see in this archive, the emergence of players like Charles Bender and Jack Meyers. Two prominent Native American baseball players who made a significant impact in the major leagues — including Bender with his Hall of Fame career.

08:07

So you're watching this deeply political underground emerge. This itself is the origins of modern baseball; its methods of capture and memory and documentation and reflection themselves reveal the deep, sacral intrigue of this modern unification force. It’s a radical rebellion against the existing cultural narratives. Spanish colonial hegemony; the segregational infrastructure of early modern America; the roots and foundations of slavery and oppression of native people in both empirical superstructures. This method emerges and is preserved and documented in equally radical ways of early democratization of media — real photo postcards printed by individuals documenting games, letters, Cuban photographic studios (some of which served and depicted revolutionary leaders themselves intimately); independent black artists and Cuban community members who preserved and produced image memory in scrapbooks and as creative proofs of contribution to these emergent grassroots and early institutionalization attempts of organization in light of the dominant hegemonic imperatives — the fractures that themselves, through imagistic and technological enlightenment — anticipate re-unity from the shattered fragmentations and fragments of the myth structures which undergirded separation and segregation narratives through propogations of stories of power, status, and inequality and violent — not inclusive — difference of and in human being and being human.

And before I get deep into the Deadball era aspect of the narrative, which I have as 1909 to 1919 — I want to give a quick example that elucidates this phenomenon of the political underground of image making and image breaking; preservation as grassroots process of counter-narrative.

You have this significant early baseball image in terms of black barnstorming. It's a St. Paul Colored Gophers RPPC that depicts Bobby Marshall, the early boundary breaking black athlete in multiple different disciplines. But it also has — as is common with a lot of these political underground forms of documentation — actual written game narrativization on the back of the postcard, which is being sent to another individual. It’s a form of a communication and preservation of historical truth in the midst of political erasure and exclusion from the institutionalized, narrative structures which assume dominion over history, memory, and political reality. This itself is a seed of what is destined to break and be broken of and from these walls and dams of consciousness.

09:04

So then from 1909 to 1919, you're looking at the professional image making infrastructure of baseball in the major leagues as a segregated institution. This becomes very powerful with the total emergence of photography and photojournalism as a form of newsmedia which undergirds the empirical context of information as truth in the United States.

And in that place, a very fertile ground for the actual transformation of cultural images through the art of the photograph. And this is where it gets quite profound… that the photograph itself is an interpretive art of the production of images. It’s not documentary truth — although, in a news context, it assumes the mantle as such. It’s an interpretive, subjective aperture for the communication of assumed material grounds; a frame and framework itself for the inclusion and exclusion of information in space and time. It’s a limited frame.

There's a lot of depictions here from this period of time that I found and uncovered that are actually highly artistic portraiture modes or action modes that are captured by press agencies as diverse as Spooner and Wells, Paul Thompson, the Bain Syndicate.

Highly artistic… they straddle the realm between artistic depiction and documentation — including a press collage of Tris Speaker swinging from 1916, which actually… the typographic structure of the photographic document, as well as the paint markings on the actual collage itself — anticipate some of the more radical European industrial artistic movements such as Dada and Constructivism, which developed just months, if not years after this photo was assembled in a press room.

There's a very fertile undiscovered high art movement that is occurring in these press offices through early photography syndicates that are capturing the most important cultural phenomenon in America at this period of time — in this deadball era, which is baseball. And through that documentary need, that cultural need to supply the images of this unfolding internal cultural myth that is becoming more and more prominent and culturally relevant in American history, you have these syndicated capitalist models that spring up to fulfill this need.

10:57

And this connects very intimately with industrialization in America and industrial culture in America… and the unrecognized artistic movements, art historical movements of industrial culture in America. This prominently includes press photography and the early modern baseball card — in such diverse packaging as ice cream or candy or tobacco.

So you're witnessing, in real time, this entire art historical movement that uses photography, painting, mixed media as a springboard, a revolutionary springboard to create democratic access to images across the nation for the extremely important events of baseball and baseball history which are unfolding at this time. This is all entirely utilitarian, with the care and consciousness of a craftsman intertwined with the urgency of an early modern newsman. The images seek and strive to catch up to the now. To communicate the now; the truth of the moment of the now. In veritas, to depict the cultural myth as an event, a rite of mass communal participation across the bounds of time and space. This is a great integrity at the heart of the early journalistic project of baseball; it itself, too, contains the seeds of the great emergent truth to come.

The 1912 World Series, the 1916 World Series, images of the 1919 World Series, right? These are massive, massive events which impact the American political and cultural public consciousness itself.

And the demand for images there is perhaps higher than anywhere else, even perhaps more so than war photography — which is how the photojournalism in America initially gets started in the late 1800s. So you're witnessing a mythological consciousness that is emerging in early America through photography as a very, very prominent and necessary form. It communicates baseball as a communal art of striving; a cultural rite and form which mimics and mirrors back the struggle and turn of an industrializing, nascent… soon to be mid-century world power. The bridge and bridging moment between the agrarian, pre-industrial labor of wood and leather; the gangplanks of empire and steel.

12:30

Without photography, the living myth is obscured. It's obscured by the documentary necessity, the industrial necessity of the creation and production of these images. Without the printing press, without the cell phone, without the book or the church or the news media — how can the myth be received, processed, metabolized at a global, communal level? How can the transformation occur en masse? Otherwise, the world view and image is fragmented, segmented, segregated to time and place. The cultural image and mythos and teleology is relegated to where it can be seen and heard.

This documentary revelation of America’s mythic medium of baseball — it's not being framed as an art historical movement of individuals or revolutionary movement. It's being framed as an industrial necessity… a national necessity of the communalizing of information to actually interconnect a national community around its mythic archetypal terrain and unfolding in time and space with baseball; in turn, with Hollywood. It is this cultural network of collective dreaming and witnessing the revolution of the internal psyche through the rapidly changing and developing unfolding of industrial modernity which is powering the American cultural machine… of the production and creation of images to supplement this mythology. It is a need of binding the movement of the whole in unison to a theme, to a song, to a ritual of craft which ennobles and emboldens their own labor — in constructing the modern American skyscraper of modernity. To give reason to their claims and vision of self; to see space and time and the nature of their space and time reflected back to them in an art upon the walls of the ancient cave, so to speak. This is the rite of the art of the mythic turn of consciousness; even as it is written, it shifts forevermore into something else entirely…

13:28

So — just to give you the metastructural understanding at a high level — you have this very subversive, unique and profound movement of revolutionary baseball that is occurring beneath the surface of the industrial cultural narrative of baseball proper in terms of the professional league in America through exclusion, through segregation… that is unfolding — not only in Cuba — but is unfolding in the American black barnstorming of this period of time from 1900 to 1920, when the Negro Leagues are created; in Native American schools…

It becomes an industrial footing in the Negro Leagues and the increasing compound excellence of the Cuban Leagues and leagues in Mexico; throughout the Carribbean — which itself as a unit of revolutionary forces and exchanges of information across space and time begins to excel the major leagues and inevitably speeds toward integration in the next half century.

So you're looking at that radical subversive underpinning — which is depicted here in the archive, especially through radically subversive materials of cultural production and memory, including half tones from Bohemia in Cuba, colonial government game permission letters, and celebratory composites created by early photography studios (including Maceo in Cuba) — which would actually take portraits of Cuban revolutionaries as well; as intertwined figures with the cultural fabric of baseball itself.

So there's a very, very profound revolutionary liberatory framework that is occurring that is made subconscious by the sheer mythic narratives of empire, power, and dominion. In a psychic, historical sense. But this is actually what is being made conscious as a radical form of cosmological integration of the shadow as a disjected form of self and self creation. In the very making of empires of exclusion, segregation, and slavery — they are anticipating their eventual resolution as in integration of the collective political psyche — as an inevitably realization of the profound humanity that lies and lay therein at all times; the horror of the failure to reckon with this essential truth across all perceived borders and bounds. This is the destiny of all psychic acts of fragmentation; they echo throughout history as radical liberatory modes and moments of revolutions and revelations of technology and history. Such a moment is the convergence of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and the television camera. This radical moment of humanity bursting through the technological lens with historical immediacy — a humanity which is seen and shown as a radical break from the narratives which upheld power as separation and exclusion.

15:27

And the artifacts that emerge from that framework, the framework of the revolutionary, grassroots — interconnected multinational organization of baseball — are also radical and outside of the narrative structure of photojournalism that occurs in the early modern United States… if not by sheer necessity of the media needed to be used and incorporated to preserve and restore history in the face of insitutional erasure and economic stability; the onus on individuals and small groups and collectives to retain and transmit and preserve the world history of this essential liberation movement.

The empirical narrative structure of US photojournalism as industrial media empire depicts and captures with a sort of rhythmic regularity the development and unfolding of the dominant, visible narrative as myth structure early modern professional baseball. The transmission — from photo syndicate to news outlet to newsstand to public perception.

The revolutionary artifact(s) are a subversive mode.

Or of a subversive nature.Including a great one that is in this early modern dead ball era — that actually breaks up the conventional mode of photography as a way of communicating the image myth structure of baseball — which is a letter from the Kansas City Packers. A rebellion within the duopoly of the AL/NL superstructure in 1914 and 1915 as a part of the Federal League. The letter denotes George Stovall's impending arrival as the first Federal League player to secede from the union of the empire of baseball culture, so to speak, at that period of time.

So there's disruptions that are occurring within this... centralized narrative of baseball. And they're being captured in this archive unconsciously as I'm moving through it and saying, instinctively… intuitively — here are moments where there's this radically subversive moment or movement of humanity or inclusion that is disrupting this. And, more often than not, it is a form of media that breaks the dominant teleological arc of image capture, render, translation, and distribution as a mass, architectonic network of media profusion. A cultural, industrial network of media as a binding force of the narrative images; as such, the cultural mythos of empire and baseball. The regulating force of the public perception and consciousness; as such, the regulating force of the cultural mythic system of self belief and perception of self and other; jurisdiction of the bounds of the in group and out group of the collective.

It actually becomes a very regular… it's an art historical movement itself — the movement of early photojournalism through the dead ball era of 1909 to 1919. It’s an art movement of the transformation and regulation of consciousness through the exclusion and inclusion of the epic images which then themselves form a narrative of the growth and transformation of modern baseball as a mythic, spiritual narrative of the American consciousness and subconscious itself. As a; the institutionalized, industrialized mirror of empirical self image production. A collective cultural apparatus of self perception and definition.

And yet — remains the subversive, grassroots forces of culture that are the inclusion of baseball through ulterior means and subjectivities — ulteriorized by the media machine of the dominant belief system apparatus of culture at large: from, again — printing press to photojournalism, to television to social media. This is a technological aperture opening; the real, deep, profound myth — of the widening of the aperture of consciousness; perception itself — vis a vis the democratization of technology as a shattering of the borders of space and time. A unifying force of culture and humanity and myth. And the superstructural myth itself is… from fragmentation to unification via revelation as in sight.

16:51

And as the dominant structure of the image of history unfolds…

Including the rivalry between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees for the early 1920s seasons, and then the slow centralization of baseball entirely into the city of New York with Brooklyn, New York Giants, and the New York Yankees — as a sort of unit of perennial confrontation in these World Series matchups throughout the late 20s into the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

You have a really profound centralization and consolidation of institutional power that occurs at the end of the Deadball era, which I really… the hinge point that I really locate in the Deadball era itself is the 1916 World Series — because it's just months before when the US becomes involved in World War I.

And then again, as is consensus, the 1919 world series championship games. I have one here in the archive. It's the Reds’ championship caliber infield posed before the Black Sox world series. That to me is almost secondary — to again, what is more of a political disruption to the narrative structure and foundation of baseball in World War One… than the movement or moment that occurs in baseball with the 1919 Black Sox shortly thereafter.

And the reason that World War I is so specifically disruptive is so important. You have these headlines across the nation that are describing the outbreak of World War I almost exclusively. Front pages full of international action and events. And in the same breath and in the same headline, they're describing the unfolding of the 1916 World Series with the Red Sox and Brooklyn Robins. It's a very powerful moment of the national consciousness — being registered on the front page of the image machine itself.

18:48

It's prioritizing in real time — the culture of baseball perhaps above all else… which is a really, really powerful striking kind of encounter that I'm perceiving here — in terms of the globalization movement that is occurring worldwide through industrialization and through the propagation of images. The ability to travel — people and information — and how that impacts the national consciousness and how baseball continues to be; grow even in the midst of this conflict, and become more and more of a priority in the national consciousness. Baseball itself is the mythic, spiritual container of the American self and identity; even in the midst of the first world war-time in which America becomes increasingly called into action, the mythic center and heart of the nation is in the sport of baseball. And the news machine itself is called to account; report accordingly. And to register said importance directly in relation to how baseball itself is registering in and within the national consciousness — even in a time of unprecedented strife and recoil at a global scale. It’s a psychic revelation first — a revelation revealed in and through the conflict of media and information as a creation, propagation, and reassurance of identity as the fabric of the bounds which hold culture and culture as forms of group and systems of belief, therein… together.

19:41

So as we get towards the end of the dead ball era, there is this dynastic conflict between the small ball New York Giants of John McGraw's managerial territory and the emerging power threat of the New York Yankees with Babe Ruth. And that's highly documented here in the archive, as well as the slow death of the dead ball mentality, because the way that the game is being played is changing. These are well founded in the historical, institutional rendition of baseball as memory.

But you still see, progressively, this subversive element — which acts as a counter — specifically through Cuba. I think Cuba in particular continues to be the subconscious focus because it is the integrative professional baseball force that still exists and is existing during this period of time. Even perhaps more so than the Negro Leagues as a professional institution, which does take in Cuban players such as Jose Mendez with the Kansas City Monarchs.

But the Cuban league itself continues to act as that first foothold of the integrative power of baseball and actually, into the 1920s, includes a lot of professional baseball players from the segregated, institutionalized league in the United States — who come to Cuba to play in the winter leagues as well. So there's a total integration that occurs there across all across the entire spectrum of the different forms of baseball that are being developed and unfolding beneath and even within the dominant narrative of American professional segregated baseball in the early 1900s. This is all happening at least a quarter century before the integration of American professional baseball as a rising to the collective, public consciousnesss — an event of Jackie Robinson stepping onto the institutionalized, formerly segregated field of the sport proper.

And so it's very powerful to see that continue to unfold throughout the 20s and 30s; the perseverance of archival memory which itself is the unitary Cuban collective consciousness of this radical mode of baseball and culture preserved, lost, and remembered by recurring institutional efforts and the works of great grassroots and cultural historians of the game. In relationship — to see the quality of the photography and the image work in the dominant, hegemonic archive of US media baseball capture and proliferation become increasingly cinematic… as the shutter speeds; the actual technology of the camera itself evolves on a day-to-day basis — in terms of the work and active photojournalism and capturing these images.

Because really, beneath the story of baseball itself as it unfolds — a narrative of integration and inclusion across national borders and racial borders and ethnic borders… a narrative of profound globalization of consciousness as it pertains to difference and community. In group and out groups…

What really, really more so…. what you're encountering foundationally — is a revolution of image technology, in which the medium itself (or lack thereof) actually forms the aperture of the myth in the way that the myth is being disclosed. This is to say — that becoming conscious is legislated and jurisdicted at a collective consciousness level by the materials of truth or lack thereof as technological and technologies of information and ontologies of revelation as they are revealed to the culture or civilization at large; the slow processes of intense aversion in reaction and the gradual metabolism of truth; truths as image technology as inclusion, or image technology as cosmological awakening — which themselves shift the entire aperture of the collective consciousness proper. Jackie Robinson is to the revelation of Copernicus and the sun.

This entire process of the modernity of baseball vis-a-vis image making and production as an industrial modernism of ‘the real image’ of photography and television and film as a cinematic epic movement from the documentary limitations or the central figuralizations that occurred in the early 1900s; even prior into Western art history as portraiture and illustration in the 1800s and prior. These are technologies of possibility of the depiction of reality; the conflict of image and perception; depiction and subjectivity and interpretation. And therein; the tension of the consecration of power as in an egotism of self perception; self elevation; status and power narratives that inform the basis of empire and political and social control — and accordingly, suppressed, oppressed, and repressed histories of human truth that are shudderred to the eye of history and time by violent erasure of institutional image and technology inclusion. The lack of democratized image predicates, almost entirely, power narratives of exclusion and hierarchies of humanism, humanity, and inhumanity as subjugation and segregation; slavery and control.

22:34

In the early 1900s, due to limitations of shutter speed, a lot of what you're observing are more so figural depictions that closely actually… resemble portraiture; painting in terms of how they're being framed and centralized around an individual. Depictions that require still or near still capture to render the image without significant blur or image disruption/corruption in this early photojournalistic mode. In this way, you’re seeing the breach of the eye of the camera and the eye of the painter; this crucial moment of rupture where the emergent mode of paradigm shift and revelation still remembers the former by way of speed of time; processing.

Through these syndicates of photographers and then into the 1920s and 30s with the emergence of wire photography — the syndications as in laboring bodies of industrial image capture and production become more institutionalized and the figural mode of depiction in terms of individuals becomes progressively more cinematic and extended into space and time as a breadth and width of capture of the real movement of relative physics; as such, naturally inclusive of a larger scope and scale or spectrum of information — due to technological capacity. The aperture of the human works similarly in neurological sensitivity; sight and scale of senses; speed of synaptic processing. The image technology; making and breaking of the perception of world is a prosthesis of flesh and machine.

23:32

So beneath the institutional narrative, which you might consider to be the capital city of baseball, so to speak — which would be the American Segregated Professional League — you're witnessing this unfolding of a technological revolution of perception; most importantly… even beneath the industrialization of America as a productive economic machines… a technological revolution of images. Which is actually informing the way that baseball and the human and America and reality is perceived.

Not just on a practical level, but on a narrative scale — in mythic time and self visualization as a psychic practice; a central constellation of the internal visual image of who I am and who and what reality is; the relationship of self to the other, or self to world — in terms of the inclusion beyond figuration (traditionally the realm of portraiture and early photography to ground still images into rendered photographic light form) into a full spectrum realization of the practice of baseball as an ecosystem; as an active movement which is gradually and radically expanding its aperture of perceptive inclusion of information.

So you're watching a technological revolution and evolution which includes — in terms of broadening the spectrum and scale of knowledge and information. This is a psychedelic revolution, or a revolution of ‘psyche revealing’. It is itself a revelation, in the Biblical sense, of truth through technology which avails a magic of perception that extends the aperture of the body into space-time; shatters the formerly perceived notions of the cosmological truisms of the Sun’s revolution around the Earth. This is a cultural meta-structural truth of collective perception — it, too, shatters the segregated monomyth of baseball.

24:00

So a lot of what I observed actually through this process of cataloging early modern baseball is that this subversive movement is twofold… it's actually founded in Cuban baseball through its integration process in 1900; thus founded in the foundation of the creation of Cuban baseball itself in 1864 — and the entire revolutionary political movement that occurs in the span of those 35 years.

Furthermore, you’re also witnessing this psychedelic, spiritual revolution of consciousness which is in tune with the historical, political revolutions of inclusion, exclusion and liberation. Deeply in tune. It’s the technological revolution of consciousness — the radical aperture of the expansion of consciousness which precipitates, if not attunes, the collective consciousness unto and toward the inevitability of radical expansion of self; integration of the subconscious made other in the political light of history. The death of the interpretive, subjective elevative portraiture, illustrative, still image of the entirety of human history unto this point — a symbolic imagery of self elevation and egoic elevation; correspondingly via interpretation a subjective diminishment or psychological imaginative reality of self-mysticism as a way of preserving a childlike form of egoic perception — a shield against the truth of reality; the elevation of a chosen, pre-selected group to status and/or valor… and the birth of the moving image — which itself I think, in many ways, ends the mythic era of baseball.

Because the way that the story is being told includes — to the point of which it becomes history and no longer becomes mythology. The history and the truth of history is revealed in the monolithic incorporation of the multi-spectrum and viewpoint communication of literal reality and realities. The truly modern world becomes a thousand cameras — each of them an eye of God, pointed and documented; even in the handheld device, a television screen — availing perception through… even the flattened image… the real across space and time without loss of fidelity; with increasing speed and clarity of depiction. A truth that can be told by a hand and a camera and internet access; a World Series where Jackie Robinson steals home, broadcast to hundreds of thousands of television screens. Gone is the middle man of the interpretation of history; the space of time to weave narratologically events and truths; now is the time of the immediacy of the conveyance of history without newsman or court painter to tout status and tilt image in the favor of the hand of money or power. The democratization of the image is itself the radicalization of the consciousness of humanity toward humanity itself — without arbiter or truth teller to institutionalize truth from above, or below.

24:59

Mythology is always in some way abstracted from the literal process and movement and unfolding of history. It always, in some way, is fictional — or in some way is imaginal. And the reason it is as such is that the entirety of it cannot yet be captured or cataloged or understood. Myth is the bridge and the breach between reality and the current stage or state of understanding. Myths, in this way, can be intensely private and individual or intensely public and communal. And they can also be manipulated by industrial and institutional and empirical power constructs to create the aperture or the image or the perception of a certain type of reality grounded in the space of untruth and obfuscation that myth necessarily allows — between revelation and uncertainty.

So some of that world or that realm of processing remains in the abstract or the realm of the dream or the realm of the creativity or the artistry of imagination and thought. This in many ways is like how many world civilizations function — all across space and time. They live in the mythic realm because they do not yet fully understand… so that the mythic process or the belief process or the imaginal process in one aspect or another supplants the total understanding or it fills in the gaps where knowledge is not yet fully present. This is the realm of story and metaphor; the breach between consciousness and language — the unknown and the necessity of founding some aspect or element of existence and human reality in a regulating, regulatory cultural force or discipline which prevents utter unmooring into the unknown.

And this is the process that we actually observe going on in and through baseball as a media culture. It is no coincidence it peaks and is peaking; shifts radically with the television and World War II with the rise of existentialism and Nazi Germany in this massive mid-century industrial globalism. It's a culture of image depiction and propagation which allows for understanding, which allows for information to be transmitted. It's a highly visual phenomenon.

It's a spectator phenomenon — just from the theater of the stadium itself, into the way that news media replicates and propagates information to create a national understanding of baseball itself as an infrastructure and as a working ground where information is portrayed; communality and collectivity is established through a consensus perception of manufactured event and phenomena as cultural ritural and rite.

The bat makes contact with the ball, runs are scored — and that is being documented: both textually in terms of statistics and qualitative information… as well as visually, primarily through press photography and the creation and propagation of baseball cards through consumer goods.

26:57

So you're witnessing this epic conjuring of an entire sort of bewitchment — of cultural and social craft through media images, which itself is a meta myth. It's a meta structural mythology through technology as a culture — as a projector system of light, ontology, meaning, and images… which is disrupted from below by the subversive revolutionary crafts of baseball — such as black barnstorming, the Cuban professional leagues and the Negro leagues — as a radical movement toward integration: culturally, socially and politically.

While at the same time, the industrial technology as an apparatus of power and meaning and image making, is propagating the myth center of baseball itself… and this very advancement and revolution of the technology as in machines (and at a deeper level, the genetic evolutions of humanity into increased consciousness and perception through the apparatus and aperture of the body as a network of neuro-synaptic consciousness; sensory perceptions and perceptibility) — is destroying itself by way of its self-revealing.

The image making creation and cataloging process of the industrial machine of news media is being disrupted by technological revolution into the creation of the camera which captures moving images. The very requisite technological and political tools necessary to sustain control and power are breaking it in real time. Even as power is asserted as in industrial control as in economic over these machines; how and what and when they produce, the image line is — perhaps entirely subconsciously and unknowingly — broken by photography and photojournalism and the democratization of the image in a way that is irrevocable; clearly precipitates the evolution of the moving image; the snowball of image technology into handheld, democratized, highly accessible moving image producers as in cell phones; computers — personal devices capably of transmitting, directly and immediately, political realities and democratic subjectivities.

This movement, the paradox of technology as a revolution and evolution of power and information through art as a transformer of consciousness — is the true force of evolution, revolution, and nature beneath all forms… the force and factor which contributes to the rising in global political and social consciousness beyond all attempts to manipulate, suppress, and control information for the benefit of hegemony; a hegemonic group. Even in examination of the 20th century alone, it becomes clear how the formerly institutionalized walls of culture are and were shattered; the political and philosophical total and utter razing of the formerly conceived grounds of humanity and meaning that occurred therein — as a direct result of image technology as revelation; science itself being, in this way, a way of perceiving and conceiving of the cosmology, situation, and position of the individual within the universal whole.

27:54

So you can see — the quality and the texture of these images change even though the game that's being depicted remains, for the most part, the same in essential structure and form. Maybe the qualities of movement shifts slightly as baseball innovates itself in terms of technique. But you witness — barreling into the 30s and 40s — this emphasis in image capture toward the cinematic structure of baseball as a movement, right? This is a psychic anticipation by way of the advancement of technology into the television of baseball. A synthesis of senses into a perceptible form of consciousness which mirrors back this integrative thrust and urge which is rapidly accelerating; native to the industrial technological age.

Image not as a stillness, not as a figuration of individuals, but a movement as in an ecological process of perpetual change. An action of profound dynamism. And this, of course, is directly implicated in the avant garde art of the time and prior as, too, a psychic anticipation — Duchamp perhaps being the most notable.

This is just the technology catching up to the reality — the truth that is and has existed all along — the possibility of compression of space and time; the singularity native to a quantum mechanical understanding of the presence of the universe… which then avails increasing understanding of cinematic and full spectrum perspectives of what is actually unfolding in real time. There needs to be a mechanism, an aperture thus for us to see — as a culture; as a unit of collective consciousness. A technology — in the way that the universal is availed to genius; the full scale of the field is availed to a camera placed in orientation high and far above the stadium lights.

And as such, breaks the myth, it breaks the mythology.

And you can see — as we barrel towards the creation of the video camera, the cinema camera in terms of a way of capturing baseball for television, which is public broadcast… the game itself actually breaks from its segregated mythic social, cultural, and political gates and structure and walls of the city. The technology itself as it innovates into the broadcast of World Series games in the 1950s on television — that itself coincides, perhaps not even coincides, correlates directly — with the integration of baseball as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon.

29:19

And in the creation of this archive, my understanding became — just through the study of these media images and media objects — that the image-based exclusion and inclusion and narrativization as an ontology of humanity… even just through the slowness of the technology and localization of perception and distortion of information through interpretive perception as a culture of hearsay, minds; a darkness of science and the ability to truly replicate and image reality…. and the institutional and technological resources required to capture images (and the conflict therein between truth and power)… played a massive, if not complete and whole part in the exclusionary foundation and fabric of baseball, which then, as a natural counterpoint to the melody of delusion, confusion, and exclusion — created multiple different counter narratives. Melodies in the darkness, so to speak — or melodies of the disjected, the conscious; melodies in the shadow; the dark of history as an act of collective disjection of the essential, real human body into a cultural narrative of separation — far and away from reality; in the dark of dreams, mythology, and violent self exclusion.

And those counter narratives were depicted in radical ways — way of subverting the economic power structures of the forefront of the industrial technologies and image making technologies (read: court painters) that undergirded and yet predicted the demise of the roots which held them by exclusivity of access [technology as a sheathe of radical, front line, vanguard information which then becomes progressively ‘outmoded’ — faster and faster across history and time, as it too, evolves faster and faster… and as such, as and when ‘outmoded’ becomes increasingly economically and financially accessible to the demos] — such as real photo postcards, which were easily producible by individuals.

Such as half-tone printing by Bohemia Magazine or reprints from the original negatives by Cuban national magazines in the early mid-1900s as they were recovering the ontology of the creation of baseball in Cuba. As a way of remembering and reforming the national root structure as they faced another political, revolutionary upheaval — one intimately intertwined with US involvement in Cuba; the Western hemipshere proper. Commemorative composites created by revolutionary adjacent photography studios in Cuba. Documentary letters that were captured and photographs that are very hard to trace.

They could be archival photographs that were fit into scrapbooks, perhaps taken specifically for the owner of a specific Cuban team, or a studio cabinet photograph that was taken for reasons unknown in Cuba. Private forms of media and memory; group forms of media and memory outside of a circuitry at large of myth making in empire as a status and cultural narrative forming and affirming architecture.

30:49

You're looking at a media documentary realm which is an industrial empire of information — which propagated and created and propped up the mythic narrative of the shifts of baseball… which itself, occurring on the ground level, is a great arc of fantastic historical change. From Babe Ruth’s power baseball to Ray Chapman and the live ball shifts which transform how the game was played; the gambling and labor disputes throughout early modern baseball history — I think this is all well documented by the institutional structures of memory.

But what's not, I think, fully being understood — is the relationship between technology, media; the propagation and creation of images, specifically the revolutionary innovation of photography — which moves us away from illustration and portraiture as conventional Western art historical modes of understanding and capturing reality as vision and perception of truth.

That movement into photography and how photography actually breaks open the terrain of image-based information — which actually informs through representation what is included, who is included, and why, and the foundational grounds of reality.

So if you look at this, even in terms of the development of AI into 2025 and the creation of photo-like images and hyper-realistic video, it disrupts and disturbs the ground that was established first by the innovation and the technological innovation of photography — which allowed us to, by compression and condensation of light and the three dimensional world into a two dimensional image of progressively more and more accurate space-time information… understand thousands of miles away or even across time what was occurring historically and immediately through visual information, not just text documentation, which required a lot of filling in the blanks imaginatively. And again, text description is an interpretive mode of perception. A cameraman might point a camera in a certain direction, or at a certain length — but the eye of fidelity of the camera is something that disrupts the former historical imagination in a way that cannot be recovered by the subject proper. Especially, as the technology became more and more in fidelity through shutter speed into the 20th century, in terms of depicting the scene itself as a holistic ecological event of movements.

33:07

So I was just recently watching the 1955 World Series highlights. One of the big items in here toward the end of the archive… which itself ends in the 1960s and early 70s with Satchel Paige's final return and his induction into the Hall of Fame… we'll get to that in a second — I was looking at the 1955 World Series Game 1 poster which was put up all across New York City in preparation for the showdown between the Dodgers and the Yankees. Once again. And the Dodgers finally win one in this.

And so I was watching the 1955 World Series broadcast — and it really struck me just how between eras this early television camera capturing of the event of baseball was. So much of it is so evocative of the deep past — including obviously the black and white, the sounds they use; music — all of these different aspects. The radio sound. The still camera perspectives that are included in this process… that they're using the foundational grounds of a bygone era. They're using the foundational grounds of a bygone era to do this.

The consciousness is shifting between an old paradigm and an unprecedented future. It’s a crux moment — to create this very, very, very new emergence of image technology and media technology into the future at this point. The habits and ontologies of the old are being used to interface with this radically new mode, in an attempt to make the transition; the shift. It’s a technological hyperspace moment — as with photography — an ontological paradigm shift of perception and perceptive mode. Radically new grounds.

It's an incredibly radical turn, which doesn't have historical precedence in terms of the moving image being directly projected into homes in real time — as opposed to cinema, where you would go and watch a moving image product in a theater — which had been pre-produced and pre-scripted and pre-sculpted as a product, as opposed to a real-time documentation of what is occurring. This itself is a leap in time, right? It's a leap in space and a leap in time in terms of what you're able to depict in the space of the image, but also when you're able to depict it — as opposed to historically, across this photographic movement — you have at first the photograph itself, which is trimmed to be published directly in the newsprint in the early 1900s.

And then the innovation of wire photography toward the 1930s, where images can be projected across wire to different media institutions, then be published the next morning through this process of wire translation of the image.

35:29

So you can see how this image technology is evolving and developing alongside the industrialization of the world and the industrialization of America in terms of an image technology. It is abstract or more difficult to trace in terms of it being a media object — a consciousness transformer within how images move and function and widen the apertures of perception of self and world — but is still evolving, right alongside the planes, the trains, the distribution channels of goods and the way that knowledge is being transferred and moved around space and time.

It's becoming quicker. It's becoming more radically open. And as that radically opening movement of expansion is occurring, you have a massive, massive shift in the cultural and social and political fabrics of humanity in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Because consciousness itself as an aperture; as the fabric that always already formerly holds societies together — is fracturing as a dam, or a wall of enclosure — but is unifying as a revelation; a recovery; an incorporation of the truth that always was there as an awakening to the true, holistic, unified nature of the cosmological self and the unbroken ecology of humanity, existence, and the universe itself proper.

And those gates, necessarily, I think through this archival work — I see more and more have to be opened by utter necessity of radical mass awakening — because as the image technology expands and becomes more radically accessible and democratized through innovation, you have more and more ability to see and depict and hear from and understand the experiences of others outside of the institutionalized industrialized media outlets which formerly exist locally or nationally — that propagate dominant narratives. This, again, is the same with the Copernican revolution or the quantum mechanical innovations of the early and mid 1900s.

What is necessary are the image models as mass cultural projections which unveil and reveal the truth through direct perception. And what this revelation is working simultaneously with and against are the dominant cultural ideological mechanisms and machines of industrial image culture as an economy and economies of power. But these very economies undercut themselves in their goal. In creating power, they offload the real democratic, technological means for image perception and propogation which themselves are the true revolutionary mode beneath all political, social, and cultural stases. The creation of power is technology; technology as a means to access and control and movement of resources and information. But this creation of power is also synonymous with the revelation of how things work. In this way, through power, truth is revealed — even as an accident, or incidentally — through techne as power, revelation is imminent. And revelation, unlike a mechanism, is much harder to control and corral once it becomes a mass cultural phenomenon of understanding the real circumstances that undergird and underly the narrative dream culture; the collective mythos and mythology which holds and binds an architectural unity of national or civilizational selves together in belief.

36:53

So when you look today in terms of modern history and culture with outlets like TikTok or social media, there's a disruption… which — there's conflict and there's the conservative repression and then the radical liberation that's occurring within those outlets — because it's a process of how information is controlled, propagated and made available. These technologies are owned and operated by vested interests, themselves with desired visions of reality and truth; for the most part, due to the nature of political power and narrativization — visions that are not based in the reality of truth, if such a thing is even possible or reachable within their teleologies; visions of the real. They are the unconscious arbiters of techne as a prosthetic, a way into seeing and perceiving the real — with power as a goal; collective revelation as an inevitable, unconscious offshoot.

And so when you have this kind of radical leap that occurs, really right around the integration of baseball with the television camera live broadcasting these events and games — you have this synthesis of sound, which was normally left to radio. And that would be the way that people would convene these games across space in pseudo-imminent time — due to the fact that the broadcaster would narrate events. Sound and radio synthesized with visual information, which were the photographic stills that these news media outlets would take — such as NEA; they would translate those into the newsprint. They would trim them or they would airbrush them to prepare them for that newsprint outlet for the following day. This combined with taking cues from Hollywood in terms of presentation and formal elucidation of information as in perspectives and cut scenes; et cetera.

You have this condensation of information into a synthetic media technology — which condenses and compresses space and time and makes available the present moment miles and miles and miles away by way of broadcasting station. And eventually with internet streaming, you have the ability to witness those events not just through regional or national news networks, but through internet connection, which can connect you across the globe to witness these events in real time.

38:47

So that compression and condensation of information itself is the real Homeric journey. The bottling of light as revelation and revolution of consciousness through techne — which is underpinning and is being detailed through baseball as a cultural mirror and reflection of the American mythic subconscious, through which the integration of baseball is almost a natural and necessary outcome. This as a political and existential enlightenment of humanity through its cultural modes; the collective slip through empirical power systems into gradual revelation via the very systems and methods power hierarchies create and use to control information and social systems and acquire power — technology; particularly image technologies as mass cultural perceptions and apperceptions of truth through narrative sculpting and mythology.

This by way of the radical opening up of the channels of information — through which even a process like World War II… one of the most famous quotes was the commissioner said, if black men can fight alongside white men in this war, they should be allowed to play baseball. And this was kind of the big siren sound of integration happening post-World War II — is that this information and this knowledge is becoming more available. The truth of being and the interconnection of humanity and globality is becoming more and more readily and obviously apparent. No one can control this or siphon it off. It’s a revelation in real time being rapidly accelerated by the technological modes that some are desperately attempting to use and manipulate to retain self measures of control, status, grandeur…

So the systems of belief that previously existed are being demolished by the sheer fact of that nature existing. That nature of exponentially accelerating techne as revelation at a scale that is uncontrollable; through the radical reincorporation of literal elements of nature into metallic compounds which can produce and reproduce reality to profound political effect.

It's a very powerful transformation. And again, as these channels open up, the really powerful end of this to me is… I kind of signal that Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle's home run chase is the final break between photography and streaming televised news media in terms of moving images. And the emphasis there really does change for this last moment in time. It’s a last gasp of orders of operation in information. It's wire photography in terms of these images of being broadcast around the country immediately. The fervor. There's such a high demand to see and to hear from this home run chase. The entire network of imminent media is weaponized in an around the clock news cycle to gratify this pinnacle of cultural relevance unto profit by market and attention.

And then finally, I have it condensed in these final two images of Satchel Paige's kind of last ride, so to speak, with the Kansas City Athletics in 1965, and then into 1971, where he's inducted into the Hall of Fame. And both of these are wire photographs. I think it's incredibly important because it shows the end of the natural end of these news image photography cycles in terms of they're projected everywhere instantaneously and used the next day around the country. It’s the perfection of photojournalistic efficiency coinciding with the institutionalization; the recognition of perhaps the most profoundly talented, mythic, and outcasted figure in baseball history — the great Satchel Paige. That a wire photo would communicate his coronation is no coincidence — for the image making mechanism itself is twofold in his life: it is the one that makes and breaks the institutional meaning making mechanism of reality itself as arbited by a cultural order; in breaking — through the very technology it creates — it reckons with, is forced to reckon with, and recognizes the greatest myth maker and story teller in all of baseball history. He stands, in this way, at the pinnacle and root, simultaneously, of the entire subaltern of baseball; baseball memory as written from the shadows of the American mythic subconscious; into the light as recognized force of genius and nurture — which perhaps is the foremost soul of baseball if ever contained in one man.

40:34

And that is a very powerful phenomenon that occurs there.

So you have this transformation that occurs where the movement goes away from art and mythology. It goes away from this imaginative depiction, which is itself a sort of schizophrenic and delusional diagnosis of the culture that exists at the time. A violent seizure of imagination and story and narrative that is normalized to profoundly negative effect in terms of schism and separation and criminalization and persecution of indigenous, black, and immigrant people in the architecture of the United States’ mythic narrative of self and meaning and propriety of boundary proper.

It's a culture that is filling in the blanks of its history, of its existence, and of its meaning in a larger global and cosmological sense. And it's doing that out of a total lack of understanding and a lack of real structure, ecologically, in terms of the real history of how it's unfolding, when it's unfolding, and what the greater process is behind that. And this fear of the groundlessness of meaning, history, and individuality — this profound fear of the unknown — sets the stage for the collective projection of selfhood as schism of identity; criminalization as a natural outgrowth and byproduct of fear as a religious mode of perception; the unknown as a cosmological vacuum vaguely obscured in a technological dark age by myth, belief, and story — which are the foundations of an architecture of dominion and power as assurance away from the vaccuum of history and fear as profound unenlightenment. This is the history of the emergence of fascism in times of profound paradigm shift and historical change. Both channels open in the face of an utterly new and radical unknown — often overlaid atop of the very existential unknown which makes requisite myth as a condition of man to stand in for grounded selfhood and revelation as political, social, and cosmological reality.

41:49

So you can see this artistic impulse that emerges in the photography, and you can see the mythic impulse that emerges culturally through baseball — especially in the larger national sense —attempt to compensate for the lack of understanding.

And you see that myth break at the Golden Age period, which coincidentally or not is the period at which the art of photography — in terms of the very careful development of these photographs by these syndicates; very, very high polished silver gelatin photos, which themselves are a craft in a form of artisanship… that mode is abolished for the most part in the name of wire photography. For speed, for communication of information and imminence of disbursement of information.

It's not to say that it doesn't remain to a degree, the old mode of information communication — but wire photographs become the priority in terms of capturing the important cultural moments of baseball precisely because they are quicker and they're easier to move information. They’re moving closer and closer to the speed of light; the technology itself is speeding toward a singularity which itself is the break between the Newtonian bounds of physical three dimensional reality; the compression of information in the infinite present; the most minute and immediate presence of singularity.

Wires are easier to transfer and transmit information nationally or even globally. They’re digital, even. This shift that occurs is a prioritization of speed for information technology in terms of getting information to the point of availability. That shift is itself the fracture or the fragment in baseball history and mythology — as well as culture — that changes forever the aperture of baseball; that changes forever the structure of what is occurring.

43:07

And the reason that it changes that is because the information is breaking the cultural, social, and political paradigms which formerly existed in and through which the culture and the nation and the people at large were dependent. The speed of information is becoming quantum; it is breaking the space-time paradigms of perception which delimited knowledge, meaning, power, and community. This is something that happens; it can’t be explained away by the old myths. Because the time itself as it is inhabited by consciousness is radically different. It retains nothing of the mode that which was; as such, calls only for radical adaptation. All else falls by the wayside, like old cliffs by the sea.

They were dependent on the paradigms of belief, the paradigms of myth, and the ecosystem of a lack of understanding to prop up their existence and to prop up their cultures; their architectures. When Newtonian reality becomes outmoded at the level of the collective transformational perception of reality — due in large part to the availing of cultural modes to actually show this initial revelation of consciousness in the abstract, in practice, in the day to day — it cannot be re-instituted by an un-revelation. What is seen is seen in the light of day; there is no return at the collective level. Progressive revealing is fundamental.

43:34

So when that breaks with the speed of information technology, you then have an era where you're confronted with reality — you're confronted with the end of myth and the beginning of truth, the beginning of what really is. It’s a pulling away of a veil, a wool. And that's what we see with the moving image; fundamentally with photography as a direct mechanism of the reproduction of the real across dimensions as a form of perception which withstands space and time as an information artifact which can hold and communicate across the breach of space and time with increasing radical immediacy.

And of course, that's disrupted into the early 21st century with artificial intelligence and the creation and production of not only still but moving images which can easily replicate reality at and on command, far beyond ‘the real’ into the technological future — stretching the bounds of the real into the abstract once more; into the chaos of absurdity and the inability to discern truth.

So you're entering into a new paradigm, which really was last disrupted by the democratization of the moving image — which is television. And that movement of television into baseball coincides directly with its integration.

So really when you're looking at these social, cultural, and political movements, you're looking at them, fundamentally, within the total spectrum and scale of information technology.

How information is propagated, how democratized it is, and then as such how long those narratives can actually stand — the narratives that are constructed within the temporary temporality and cave these information technologies produce with their faculty of perception; vision. Because if that propagation of information is constricted to an institution, if it's constricted to a power system which controls information through capital and controls information through production — you're limited to what you can actually understand and to what you actually believe is real or true within the apertures available to you in juxtaposition or in coalition with that narrativized, institutionalized image production mechanism of dominant culture itself.

45:02

This is how belief functions with media and the creation and control of media, whether it's text or images. When that is broken through democratization, such as social media, you are dealing with a radically different situation. The former grounds no longer hold; the aperture is radically shifted and swung into a collective mobilization of information toward revelation. It is no longer contained within three stations or a news outlet apparatus. You're dealing with a situation in which media has been sort of anarchized. It's been mobilized in the hands of individuals.

And that's the springboard that you see. Historically, it continues to speed up — further and further out of institutional control and out of the register of power into the wild conundrum of emerging into reality with the photographic image; out of reality with the production of photorealistic imagery in the year of 2025.

I cut this archive off with the Paige photographs because it's the end of modernity at the point of television and the wire photo… because you have the internationalization of news media and image objects. The collision has been fulfilled of the subaltern myth remembered from the root and the institutional narrative through industrial techne and cultural propogation as religious imagery of container and inclusion/exclusion from above.

And at that point, there is — moving forward — the postmodern war over fact and over truth and over belief because the information is now present. From the end of World War II with von Neumann’s founding document of computing unto the first modern computer in 1973, it becomes a question of how the information is being narrativized and the truth is being constructed through images and through information. It’s a new Wild West of history. The previous age has been fulfilled…

…

As consciousness at large expands as a vehicle of and for the perception of self at and across all scales — it reflects back upon itself through the proverbial, technological, teleological lens and mirror of culture at large — as a way of internalizing its vision and internal mode of perception as depth and breadth of eternity itself.

In this very process, it shifts the internal consciousness architecture of existence itself. Through the theatre of consciousness — history and culture at large; the metabolism of awareness as a borders and bounds of possibility; a shattering of those borders and bounds… the deepest roots and bounds of possibility and possibilities in and of nature and being themselves are shifted, altered; moved — as in the tectonic plates of the psychic history of the universe.

Spirit and consciousness itself as the highest, most interior; as such metaphysical, determinate and indeterminate alterior framework of the entire unfolding of the phenomenological apparatus of the universe as elemental building blocks of appearance and appearances; the theatre of consciousness proper through remembry, recognition, and consciousness of consciousness proper.

Culture is the mediating action; the quantum mechanical bridge of observation — the insight into the hidden gear; mechanism of the cognitive architecture of the universal whole, conscious and unconscious — blasted out externally to be made aware in the presence of phenomenological objects; visions; theatres of movement and consequence… to reflect, be reflected upon by the cognitive architecture of the synapses and organization of the unconsciously; slowly becoming conscious evolution of the natural brain — and be altered by the vision; the glimmer of recognition of truth within behavior, pattern, rite, ritual, and intuition…

It is not the mere shadow of nature, nor its useless appendage… but its instrument in action; its phenomenological form — that which through relationship of bodies and forms; through the eye; the rising sensate awareness of all of creation and the sophisticating function of the mind; the slowly evolving, creeping vines of the neural architecture of organisms as, too, reflective instrument and nature’s technology: this situation of history and the internal recognition therein of the highest metaphysical substrates of nature itself are observed — and through this observation — the very architecture and substratum of the universe are elevated as and into conscious creation. The mediated form is the vessel, the shield for the inner substance — Spirit — whose essence is the shifting metaphysical sands; the architectonic substance of all of existence across space and time; at scale, a total internal wholeness of Being.

Culture, in this way, is like the mind's eye encountering the pillars of creation; recognizing their internal, eternal similarity.

So that's what I got. Catch y’all on the next one.

Jackie Robinson; The Most Important Moment in American History

Aug 29, 2025

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00:02

So I just want to wax poetic on this… because this just keeps getting deeper and deeper here. The moment Jackie Robinson integrates baseball is the most important event in American civilizational history.

And the reason why is because it compresses, condenses, and distills the foundational untruth — or lie — within language of the American Constitution and the founding of American civilization. It confronts that existentially through the lens of culture. And again, as we just discussed in the last video, culture… culture is at the most foundational level, at the most literal brickwork of the everyday; the impact of the lives of the everyday person… is the integration of the way of being. It's the mode of being which is represented through images.

00:55

The culture itself is a modality that is reflected back to humanity in a process of mimesis. It's a process of interrelationship through the inward projection outward of images, as in spectacle or theater or art. This is just what culture is at an existential psychological level.

So the confrontation of Jackie Robinson stepping on the baseball field with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the spring of 1947 distills the essential internal conflict of the subconscious drama… in terms of the epic shadow of racism and slavery. Literally — the projection outward of the shadow into a racialized archetype as in the American popular segregationist perception and perception of the black person.

It's a disjection of the psychic shadow into a material reality by way of metaphor interpolated onto a real, human body; a real life experience. It’s profoundly violent and violating. The unprocessed, subconscious, tectonic architecture of the American shadow and mythological body of ‘evil’ — projected outward onto another human being.

It's totally unfounded on the real, as in in this skin color dynamic creating some sort of strange, fundamental difference in humanity and inhumanity. It's a projection of the psychological shadow of the unprocessed violence in the American cultural subconscious at large. This is, again — the roots of American history are built through slavery; through the justification of the transatlantic slave trade, the enslavement of black people in this country to build its monuments, its plantations, so on and so forth. And this fundamental class structure of quote unquote human inferiority or inhuman inferiority is what allows for America to exist and become what it becomes. It’s the foundational architecture of the entire American scaffolding and reality of existence and perception. The Constitution is words on a page. The labor and work that is done is at and in the hands of slaves; indentured servants; immigrants — and land acquired through genocide and war against the indigenous people.

03:09

So you have the founding with the Constitution… the transatlantic slave trade, which builds up the American South. Then you have the Civil War, right, which it's — it is an economic conflict as well as a moral conflict. Over primacy of the American economy in the North with rising industrialization and in the South with slavery as agricultural wealth and agricultural product. This is both a moral battle for the soul of America and the psyche of America, just as much as it is an economic one in terms of power and control over the American, I guess you just call it a plutocracy really — as it has always existed — control over the legislative governing body of the country as a whole, the nation as a whole, as it continues to expand out West. Control by way of economic power and thus decision making at the level of the bureaucratic organ of the state; its laws, its precepts and grandeur.

These are just lead up moments. So I went deep into this. The last document which we broached here was actually completed on Hegel's birthday, which to me was a bit of a, you know — big flashing lights moment. I read Hegel when I was very, very young, much younger — talking about the spirit of the age and reason in history and talking about the idea that spirit evolves. There's a purpose in spirit. And the purpose of spirit is revealed through history. Through time. This is the concept of teleology — that history occurs and unfolds for a reason. And that reason is the evolution of consciousness or the integration of consciousness.

So when you look at the big picture, the integration of consciousness across the cosmos and all scales of existence is the recognition of the unity of the universe itself. You have theorists who have approached this in the past with unified field theory, for instance… or Spinoza with the monad, Leibniz as well.

04:34

These thinkers tend to be transdisciplinary thinkers. They pull together many different conceived or conceptual silos of thought and intellect, knowledge and reason… and realize, as da Vinci says, everything is connected to everything else. So the purpose in a grand cosmological scale is for the universe to become conscious of itself, to achieve self-recognition within a body or a mode of conception of thinking wherein the highest level of possibility is an unrealized quantum architecture of self-recognition through consciousness… as in a being or a vessel or a nervous system becoming conscious through the evolution of the brain or another system of cognition and having the ability to reflexively think back upon itself or reflect upon itself.

This, again, is Kierkegaard's process or concept of dialectical redoubling.

It is the concept that's reflected in a biblical sense through Job. Job thinking about the mechanism of God, thinking about God, thinking about creation, and therein forming a faculty of judgment, forming a faculty of rationality, which is evolutionarily the forebrain. That has existed for the past couple of hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to the hindbrain, which is called, quote unquote, the reptilian brain, which is millions and millions of years.

05:59

You have this long time scale process of evolution which cultivates the mechanism or the technology of the human being which is capable of, through the process of this radical cognitive architecture which occurs as a form of technology of nature, an organic technology as in an organism — which is capable of radically reflecting back upon itself and conceiving of itself its true origins and thus its cosmological wholeness.

This is what is reflected in history. This is the spirit of the age. This is the teleology of spirit becoming conscious through the model of history, through time, through evolutionary space-time. This is… it is a process of relationship, a process of reflection upon material conditions as well as immaterial conditions, as in psychic conditions; forming that ability to conceive of the relationship between the inward, as in the psychological state: how things are being perceived through the mechanism of the psyche, through the mechanism of cognition, and through the mechanism of the senses — and understanding just how radically in relationship that method of perception and conception as an instrumental technology of humanity is to the perceived outward mode and model of the universe and the world.

So this is the natural dichotomy of self and other, or self and world, or subject and object — that is formed through the perceptive mechanism of the organism itself. It looks outward and attempts to perceive. It looks inward and attempts to perceive. It attempts to perceive self and world, and it perceives a duality. It perceives a split, a difference between sensation, perception, between identity…and it's this process of trying to reconcile the seeming radical opposition psychologically.

In terms of this mode of projection or cultural cognitive model of projection collectively, you're having something that's almost so base and so fundamental as in the mechanism of racism as it historically occurs — a process of projecting outwardly bad qualities, quote unquote, bad qualities onto the perceived shadow, the perceived darkness that exists on the outside. It’s a materialization of the psyche disjected from the mechanism of perception itself — the fragmented psyche of the individual, the group; the collective subconscious as a mythic architecture of self creation — part awake and awakening to its condition; part thrashing in a nightmare of the darkness of its own revelation (or lack thereof) toward the real condition of its existence. All of life is awakening to reality; in this awakening, is in the throes of a survival level existential war, fight, and threat — unto the perception of transcendental unity as a golden age of awakening itself.

08:16

This is very much so in the same way that someone experiences an innate fear when they perceive, literally, darkness set onto the world. You have the famous quotes from Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks where he encounters a white French woman and her child on the street in Algeria and she shields her child in fear. This is a cultural level, Western civilizational level (and beyond) mode of subconscious architecture geared toward darkness and blackness as evil, demonic, wretched.

There's this sense, right, again — there's this psychological model that is being projected outwardly at a collective level upon a perceived body, body of information, an individual, an organism, that has perceived innate bad or negative qualities at a collective, cultural, constructive level of information. This is latent psychological material seeking material form as in phenomenological underpinning; a body or a being. It is a creative construction of world from a mythic dream — a dream shrouded in fragmentation, unknowing, uncertainty, fear; near total abnegation of self. And this is a warring consciousness; a warring body — a warring culture of meaning as an ‘againstness’. The subject being good, righteous; the ethnic or racial or sexual body in perceived, projected opposition as being bad, evil, or even necessitating exterimination.

Again, the cultural psyche is an information technology as a collective — a collective which is being informed by the culture itself.

09:12

This is very important. It’s a loop of psychic reification through a state or stasis of consciousness as a mutually affirmed reality of collective truth; thus the creation of a political reality in the midst of a cosmological reality which is usually in radical opposition or difference to that cognitive architecture and scaffolding of the collective doing this collective dreaming at large. These are, in many ways, skyscrapers of the mind which are nothing more than dreams in the wind, or even radical denials of real cosmological truths. Ignorances which create failures to achieve existential meaning and awakening to possibility of truly ennobling and uplifting humanity and human life; existence itself.

It's that you have a large body, whether that's the United States of America, whether that's the Western civilization — which is itself a construct of collectivity. It’s a space-time organization of nodes of consciousness as a collective of thought, or a thought-bubble of information that creates from its large model or mode of cognitive architecture. It assembles physically what it mutually reifies psychically. And that psychic baggage is the cognitive architecture that quite literally constructs the physical material of its civilization proper. And if that’s unconscious, its going to unfold unconsciously; enfold back upon itself with revelation; awakening, apocalypse. Again, the psyche is quite biblical in how consciousness and unconsciousness intersect and function and unfold and return in and upon one another as a historical inevitability. Action, reaction. The ancient Hindu concept of karma is also relevant here. The laws of nature undergird the imaginations of men; the psychic hypertrophy of history naturally reveals the delusions of men; the cracks in their psychic, imaginal architectures as philosophical modes of being which have not yet achieved a holism in vision and practice.

That construct of collectivity is receiving feedback and is engaged in feedback loops with the cultural information, which is the architecture of that group at large: whether that's philosophy, whether that's the legislative body of government, whether that's literature whether that's arts or music or cinema. Whatever whatever those models are. They're an information technology as in a mirroring of the psychological status of that large cultural body itself. They’re a reproduction of the inner state and status. The behaviors. The statements. The advertisements. This is the idea of pop culture. It's resonating with a large group of people. It represents itself the consensus mode and model of… wherein that civilizational architecture stands as a collective psyche as a collective consciousness as a collective cognition.

10:12

So you're witnessing in real time this process, it's radical, radical psychological immaturity that you're witnessing in this early modern, early pre-modern American architecture of brutal slavery, brutal enslavement, brutal dehumanization — which can really be described in no other way other than as a deep, deep, deep psychological immaturity and an unprocessed group shadow dynamic, which is being projected outward onto a group of people in order to scapegoat them and avoid dealing with the real situational reality that is occurring at that moment in time through that psychic aperture or that lens of perception in that group or that body of humanity itself.

So if you think about Western civilization and Western philosophy and Western theology at that moment of time, what you're looking at through those modes is you're looking at a status of being, a status of self-conception, and a journey toward radical unity — which is precipitated by minds like Spinoza or Leibniz, minds which are, through this radical polymathy, through this radical transdisciplinary thought and consciousness… sculpting the possibility for a total transcendent unity to be experienced within the architecture of being human itself.

This is the journey of all philosophy and the journey of all history and the journey of the universe in terms of a ability to, within the body or within the moment in space-time, perceive and be present with the quantum cognitive architecture of the universe itself, which is a total singularity as in it exists in all spaces and all places at all times as a total form of presence.

This is actually something that's very profound within the mode of athletics and is described in Taoism as the concept of wu wei, which is athletic flow. It's total presence of the aperture and the mode of being as in an intense focus or an intense attention and through that attention a solidification and a synthesis of presence within that present moment. It is a making real of the psychic force of attention, cognition, and consciousness upon that point of matter and dime of time; as such, a concentrating of the universal powers of existence through the acting and active body in motion and movement, unbroken from synthesis and the total vision of history and time and reality itself. In total flow with the cosmological force of will and existence itself through physical presence and movement.

Trying to describe it is very difficult because it is an experience; a way of being. But it's a way of solidifying the quantum architecture of existence and directing it towards a purpose. Harnessing the creative and fundamental potentials and properties of the will and tuning into the energetic force which undergirds all processes in and within the universe as a scaffolding of energetic transmission down cosmological scales of creation: universe, galactic, stellar, macrobiotic, microbiotic, and so forth. It is an everpresent mode.

It's that the idea is that the universe is entirely creative energy, which is unconscious and yet unharnessed as nature is a process of technology building and sculpting through this unconscious process of trying to fit together the elemental building blocks, which are the construct of all compounds that exist physically and form in the universe which are being born from the stellar forge of stars. These elemental compounds are being disjected from this stellar forge and are being recombined in the process of creating organisms, forms, materials, et cetera.

So this is the appearance of existence. And this itself, it goes very deep into the psychological architecture of the human — because we are doing the same process of metabolism of the psyche as it is occurring in the everyday life of the individual and the collective. We ourselves are moving, as Nietzsche says, we're on a tightrope between animal or beast and God in the sense that we are moving from a constricted, unconscious natural mode of self-construction, the technology of nature as a latent, unconscious mode of unprocessed energy, latent energy… in reproduction, in consumption of food, right, and metabolism. Power of mind through energetic metabolism of information.

All of these different ways that the unconscious will of nature is structured genetically and presented as an unconscious terabit, so to speak, of information, which is the human being — and to radically, through consciousness, alter and reconstruct that architecture through, again, through will, through awareness, through perception of the situation and status of the human and the possibilities energetically and psychically of the human to achieve real self-recognition in a cosmological sense. To become liberated and achieve liberation. This is an existential force as well as a historical and political one as in radical unity and integration. Marx and Hegel understood this quite well.

Recognition of those possibilities; recombinating them through the literal physical architecture of the human being, the nervous system, the metabolism, the organs, the digestive system, the synapses of the brain, recombinating them and harnessing in that sense the real conscious immediate will of the universe through and into profound high aesthetic movement — processing — whether that's philosophy or athletics.

14:55

Right? Again, we talked about this in terms of baseball. Baseball as an athletic is a devotion of the metabolic will or the force of the creation of the universe as a nuclear fusion into the process of a creative art form, which involves metabolism, which involves the energy of the body, which involves the exertion of the force of will, which moves the body. We're talking about the fundamental principles of the universe. Again, force equals mass times acceleration, the generation of that force towards something which is an aesthetic product. Is fundamentally inessential or unessential to creating and sustaining and constructing and recreating through reproduction human life. It's a radical, radical, radical form of the transformation of the will.

So you're already dealing with that level of revolutionary technology. We went over baseball as a non-violent sport that's dedicated toward precision and attention and using technology, prosthetics, the bat, the ball, the glove, to simulate this radical cognitive architecture of the universe through the process of physics and transformation of the metabolic force of will. We already went over that. But furthermore, to understand that baseball becomes in this deep unconscious way, the prime cultural artifact of the American political and social subconscious, the under dwelling or the underpinning of all of American civilizational processing of the psyche.

And that's what a prime cultural artifact is. America's pastime is just America's way of processing the psyche through culture as a mirror to its psychic condition, as a mirror to its unconscious, conscious battle of the dynamics of separation between realization and the unconscious forces and factors and dynamics which are operating beneath the surface of real knowledge and real awareness. Its rising forces of awakening. The Apollinian heroic journey of conscious integration of the psyche. This is the force at root of all life; fittingly, in the Greek, mythic mode — the solar force. The force of enlightening, awakening, enlivening.

The reason it becomes this is precisely because it is the highest aesthetic technology that America produces. It creates an incredibly sophisticated form of sports, again, through the things we talked about — strategy, focus, attention, the difficulty of hitting a baseball, the use of technological prosthetics as instruments to orchestrate this procession or this theater of forms. We went very deep into that. And it becomes, right, through this unconscious sophistication, this creative generation of an entire mode of being and processing… becomes America's pastime, America's cultural phenomenon.

17:52

So through that lens, right, understanding that when Jackie Robinson sets foot on the field of baseball, it is the primary foundational cultural artifact and mechanism of America's subconscious processing of everything: of its existence, of its meaning, of its spiritual existence, its spiritual nature.

We went deep into baseball as a form of theology or active worship, really, of the forces of the universe themselves. You have these temples, Ebbets Field, Polo Grounds… so Jackie Robinson steps onto Ebbets Field for the first time wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in the industrial, cultural, and economic epicenter of the United States and at this point really of the world, New York City.

What's really happening there is, at the deepest level, the United States is coming face to face with its foundational subconscious architecture, the disjected element itself, which is black life, black existential meaning, black culture; black humanity and the black self — as it intersects with the civilizational cultural mechanism or aperture of the perception of American, being, identity, and collectivity itself — baseball. This is different than the Civil War and this happens what, 10, 15, 20 years before Brown versus Board. This is a very revolutionary moment.

It's different than the Civil War in terms of the abolition of slavery; it's different than the creation of the Constitution because what it does is it reveals at the deepest, most foundational level — it's a statement in terms of a real practice of being as an integrative cultural phenomenon. The real, lived, living impacts of cultural integration as a field of unity, equality, and presence of being. Upon the psychic and psychological theatre of America’s spiritual field of striving and unfolding — its deepest metaphysical stature… steps Jackie Robinson.

The national artifact is being entered by… Jackie Robinson being a representative of this, the entire culture and community of the collective subconscious violently oppressed aspect of American civilization, which is black history. Black life. Black humanity.

So when you have this happen, again, you can look, let's say you can look, what is it, 70 years into the future and you see the election of Barack Obama as the first black president. And then you see the backlash that comes from that election after his second term. You see that in coalition with Jackie Robinson and you see the era of Jim Crow and Reconstruction after the Civil War and the struggle for reparations for black people with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and the free lunch program. What you're really seeing is this massive, massive, massive undercurrent of political energy, which is the rising up into the American collective consciousness through subconscious recognition, which is an active force, right? These are human people who are assembling and declaring their humanity through these radical, quote unquote radical — which are really just human — movements into culture, into meaning, into being right? Out from under this total psychological suppression and oppression of this state of mass projection as fanatical, violent; really, radical unconsciousness. It’s a psychological; even spiritual war for the soul of humanity as a collective organ; a transcendental unity in and of itself at the deepest, most holistic and total cosmological level. There’s a reason Dionysus and Osiris are dismembered in the myths. The psyche is fragmented by history, violence, acts of trauma; the work and the act of history is to remember and be remembered at the holy level of wholly unity. This is the seed of life ‘fallen’ from the plenum in the myth of Sophia; in the Pistis Sophia; the Gnostic fragment or shard or splinter of light — cast out and down from God. The literal metabolic organism, the microbiome, which has forgotten its true, deep, profound ancestry — the source of all life; the origin of the nesting doll phenomenon of stellar nucelofusion and energetic transfusion. The sun; in greater scales, the ‘Big Bang’ as originary explosive force of heat and light and cosmic energy. And perhaps further…

This forgetting is the loss or state of lostness of the soul in search of the spirit. The fragment in search of the whole and the unity. This is the course of all human history. The course of all life and time. True, transcendental memory and embodiment of the recognition and identity of this source. There is a reason, historically, that near all ancient civilizations involved solar worship fervently. The deep psychological memory and knowledge is there. History and revolution and revelation and innovation and genius draw it further and further into the light.

20:48

The free lunch program for school children by the Black Panthers, Jackie Robinson entering into um the cultural institution of American professional baseball for the first time. You're witnessing a psychic revelation of the disjected underground of the American political and cultural subconscious into form. And when you see the backlash that happens with Jackie Robinson, the intense, intense backlash — it's something that you also see with Hank Aaron when he breaks the home run record, Babe Ruth's home run record a couple of decades later — you're witnessing that backlash is the uh immaturity of the collective consciousness having to reckon with the… just the political reality of a collective humanity, which it is not yet willing to accept or incorporate, or even as it, maybe is not even able to understand due to its deep psychological immaturity. It’s the psychic backlash of the visceral sensation of its cultural monuments being ‘desecrated’ by the presence of the intruder, or the subconscious psychological information being perceived as outwardly from self — when in reality these are just black human beings and black athletes — with their own faults, flaws, triumphs, struggles; souls.

Again, this is all stuff we are still reckoning with. None of this has gone anywhere. But this moment of time, to again go back to Hegel, which so important... it's a revelation of the spirit of the age as the spirit of an epoch as in the American civilization and its psychological underpinnings and true metaphysical history. It's a form of biblical revelation in the sense of psychedelic revealing of the unconscious through this moment — where Jackie Robinson as an individual is shouldering this almost super heroic burden of being the representative in human form of this mass psychological force of the unfolding of history in terms of separation, fragmentation, and integration. He’s a light bringer into a realm of intense, contracted, reactionary psychological darkness and unprocessed psychic information.

And integration being the progressive force which moves all history forward. Integration in the most fundamental term being a metaphysical unity, which is perhaps most allied to Hegel and Spinoza and these Western historical philosophers and thinkers who conceive of history as a movement forward into unity; movement forward into transcendental unity of the cosmos. This, again, is the term singularity — which I find fascinating when it's used in an artificial intelligence context. Because really what we're talking about is that history as an evolution of consciousness is just a movement towards singularity as in the revelation of a transcendental unity, which is necessarily a recollection of the disjected body of nature.

Right, all of the elements of fragmented psyche — which have occurred through human evolution, brutality of survival, in-group, out-group psychodynamics, deep ancestral, ethnic, religious traumas… civilizational constructs — which have committed incredible acts of violence, both with a shrug and with a total unconsciousness. A violent, visceral, immediate erasure of disjected psychic contents and materials. A conviction of evil in humanity as unprocessed other. And unprocessing self. And thus, the unconscious nature of murder and violation of the body of the other — which is always already the body of the self as in primordial nature; primordial unity. What is done to self is done to other; what is done to other is done to self. The reverberations of action in a cosmological superstructure are unhidden and transcendental in their implications. Such work is in space and time and yet recognized beyond it in the very primordial unity of elemental bodies. Beyond relationship is the field of information and energy which constructs perceived bodies and relationship itself.

23:53

We're reckoning with and grappling with the rising into consciousness of the primacy of all of being through natural forms; through organic forms. Each species evolves, and through evolution acquires natural characteristics which are undergirding and pushing and buoying consciousness forward as a force. Human beings themselves as of millions and millions and millions of years of the process of evolution have acquired characteristics which have made consciousness increasingly possible.

So when you witness the teleological unfolding of history, you're witnessing culture itself as a mass generative mirror to the rising of consciousness. And as such, you have things like Occupy Wall Street. You have the cell phone, you have TikTok, you have the civil rights movement, you have industrialization. You have all of these different forms which massively accelerate, exponentially accelerate into the 20th century due to… I think in large part, the revolutionary movements that are occurring dating back to the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the American Revolution. These are revolutions that are occurring simultaneously that imply and impel and declare a shared humanity at a foundational level. So when you have this movement towards mass humanism… and again, this could even go further back towards Dante and the invention and creation of humanism in Italy around the fourteen and fifteen hundreds as well as the Renaissance movement.

So you have these movements that increasingly gather steam throughout centuries, which include figures like da Vinci or Michelangelo, who are revealing the architecture of unity, which is a cosmological architecture of being. This is something that is a deep form of mastery in the Hindu and Buddhic and Taoist philosophies and ethics of being — modalities which did not fragment like the Western mode… a movement which perhaps, as a quick interjection, occurred around the time of the Roman Empire, away from the Greek tradition of esoteric philosophy, deeply bound up with the Egyptian.

Galileo says that a glass of wine is sunlight mixed with water.

25:32

It's an incredibly fluent way to understand what we can now understand through technology and advanced profusion of different scientific disciplines as a process of recombination of elements and the furnace of stars. Again, this is like a transcendental unity which occurs at the level of cosmos and cosmology, but then trickles down through scales in a nesting doll effect — in the term that I previously used — a thermodynamic nesting doll effect… wherein forms acquire these same essential principles and act them out through a process of reaching back up towards and for that transcendental unity through the ephemeral body of the physical form, the genetic form, the elemental, microbial, organismic, nerve-ological form, so to speak.

So you're witnessing this at the ground floor in culture as a process of integration in the American psyche, which is really a cosmological transcendental integration of unity within the self, which is being projected outward as a dynamic of segregation, fragmentation, dislocation, alienation, right? You have this descent in modern life deeper and deeper and deeper into this, into this hole, which existentialism in the mid 20th century really digs into.

And again, Jackie Robinson, 1947. We're talking about Camus, we're talking about Sartre. We're talking about Simone Weil. We're talking about these thinkers who emerge at this exact moment and who are articulating the total loss of meaning, the total absurdity, which is the foundational and most fertile ground from that point for humanity to reckon with the cosmological architecture, the abyss which lies beneath its... conceive structured reality of drives and hungers, which are just the metabolic mechanism and the metabolism of the organism and the animal and the species itself, the unconscious production and reproduction of self; sex and survival (the Plutonic)… to go beneath that and to find the real cognitive architecture of existence itself to become aware, to achieve real fundamental structural awareness of that which creates the universe itself. And this is enlightenment. This is awakening. Sartre talks about profound self responsibility. This is the transformation, the higher level, transcendent transformation of the self unto self revelation as a cosmos, a total architecture of the cosmos as energetic form and formation and creation and decreation of appearances — all of which reveal beneath them the eternal energetic source of all existence and all being — the primordial Self proper.

27:56

And so through culture, you have this moment of Jackie Robinson, which is a radical reconciliation of this full arc of American civilization, a pinpointing moment… where Jackie Robinson takes the field in the American cultural subconscious, the stadium, the field, the theater itself — and declares himself a part of baseball. He is declared a part of baseball. He exists there. It cannot be taken back. It cannot be gone backward from. It can only be reckoned with.

You have this reckoning really, which Jackie Robinson on the field of the everyday becomes human. And he's there and he excels. He steals home in the World Series. And then from that point, you have the reaction. You have the reaction to this. You have the civil rights movement, which is a further entrenchment of this revolutionary political progressive phenomenon of profound psychological integration at the level of the collective conscious — which Jackie Robinson plays a huge part in. And then you have this progressive retrenchment, this attempt to draw back in time, to draw back in history to a moment where this had never happened, to become disintegrated — which again is the call of the immature, fragmented, disoriented psyche, which cannot reconcile this moment, which is the radical break in the history and time and space of American civilization as a psychological ground whose tectonic plates are screaming with underworld revelation… which really signals the end of American civilization.

Because the American civilization began with the foundational precept, the lie and the paradox of all men are created equal except for black people and women in the United States, really, people who are not landowning white men. It's the foundational precept where the lie is being told legislatively and is playing out culturally. And then there's that moment where culturally, the culture actually moves first and revolutionizes first. And then the legislation comes after. If it ever does. Because at this point, we're between the legislative abolition of slavery… the Jim Crow era, just brutal cultural discrimination.

And then you have Jackie Robinson, this cultural moment. It's a cultural radical progressive awakening into this push to integration at a psychological level. And this is usually what happens, right? Culture innovates before the infrastructure celebrates, so to speak. Nietzsche, Spinoza. It's a precipitation of that which is to come.

30:16

And there's this opening, right? You see Durocher in this photo. This is a 1947 wire photo just moments before Jackie Robinson is signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers and makes his debut. This actually occurred in Havana, Cuba… this spring training to anticipate the intense racism that occurs and it was occurring in Florida at that time. They move it to Cuba where this would be a more accommodating environment to make this transition. And Durocher was notably a radical supporter of Jackie Robinson in the process of integration. He, like McGraw, the early Giants manager, actually wanted to integrate baseball much earlier. They came to blows a little later just over, I think, competitiveness and difference in personalities — but reconciled with the understanding that they were both very much in support of each other.

This moment here, it's a dislocation. Again, Cuba is so important. We've gone into it. There's no need to do it again. But Cuba is so important, as in… it's like this third space. It's like the... island of the American subconscious and America tries to conquer it so much. From the moment Cuba achieves its liberation in 1900, America attempts to assert will and dominion and control over Cuba. Why? Because Cuba, what Cuba is doing is… it's radically, in a liberatory fashion, precipitating what America needs to do. Cuba is something akin to the France of the Western Hemisphere. Their cultural radar of collective consciousness is oriented and orientated radically toward a liberation and a humanism of the people; an integration. There’s a progressive spirit of history; of time and place in Cuba.

It's doing it in advance of America because I think there's a native national consciousness in and to Cuba and the Cuban people which is well in advance of what America's is or has been. I think due to in large part being a small island which has undergone very significant cultural, political, and social evolution in very short periods of time — alongside the radical liberation and abolition movement intertwined which occurred there in the mid to late 1800s, with baseball as a profound part of that architecture.

There's a lot to be said there, but that's not necessarily the focus of where we are right now.

32:14

So this moment is just so incredibly powerful because it signals the end, as I would discern it, of American civilization — because the mechanism has been revealed. It stands in the light of day in the human and archetypal-symbolic form of Jackie Robinson, the light-bringer on the baseball diamond of America’s peak cultural machine.

The subconscious rises into the consciousness. All men are created equal. Jackie Robinson steps on the field of baseball as the most important everyday cultural artifact, method of participation, method of communal engagement, method of civilization in America itself. It's not politics, it's not money, it's not businesses, it's baseball. Baseball is the theater, it is the place, it is the culture of America.

32:42

So when he steps onto that field, American civilization ends and the reckoning with the end of American civilization begins — because something has to come after that. There has to be new architecture. The awakening has occurred culturally. The spell has been broken. And this precipitates, again, the election of Barack Obama. It precipitates the American civil rights movement becoming what it becomes a decade and a half later, two decades later. When this breaks, it's different than Joe Louis. It's different than Jesse Owens. This is baseball.

Having this happen is what you would call a civilizational singularity because it's a collapse of the dualism. It's a collapse of the conscious unconscious mechanism, which is the fundamental historical tension… that conscious unconscious mechanism weaves toward resolution because it's inevitable that the unconscious will rise — because the unconscious is just naturally a part of everything else. You cannot disject the holistic unity of the cosmos into a psychological fracture, which just becomes your perspective. Nonetheless a holistic unity within a species or an ecosystem.

It's the same function as corporate capitalism. You can't destroy the rainforests of the earth and expect there not to be repercussions, or destroy the environments for short-term gain. It's a failure to understand how entire sustainable ecosystems and architectures function and thus to interact positively with them. To ensure sustainability and to grow within them. It's a failure of recognition for perceived short-term gain.

So when you function within that cognitive mode, inevitably the full force of the unconscious thrust of the unprocessed, unrecognized, unaware reality that you are attempting to perpetuate through this bubble of information… this is kind of a religiosity, if you think about it that way, it's a concept or a conceptual mechanism of reality or reality-making or dreaming which is incompatible with the laws of nature. And at a certain point, the laws of physics, they're there, and you'll feel the effects of them sooner rather than later. It's like having a very unhealthy diet. You can't put that food into your body. You can't put that energy or fuel into your body — like putting spoiled gas into a car — without the repercussions happening within the literal mechanism or the engine or the biosphere of the body itself.

35:25

I mean, this is... this has been long, long, long, the history of human beings. A sort of hopeless unconsciousness, as Jung puts it. Particularly, to think about the genocide that occurs to Native American people in the United States, Native American people being the most culturally advanced people that have lived in America. The most ecologically in tune and sustainably sophisticated. Deeply in tune with cosmological systems and cycles of energy. The irony is just insane — because it's occurring from this deep subconscious survival drive, which is absolutely destroying, absolutely destructive, absolutely violent. Its a disconnection, a dissociation — a fear as in a religiosity, a severance, a fragmentation at the root system of the collective psyche… again, perhaps traceable back to the Roman Empire and the effects of Christ, Christianity; the profound cycles of persecution therein. This would require a deep, deep, psychological exegesis of history… not for today…

Which again — this is kind of the underpinning and the crux of ‘modern’ Western civilization itself — is that it's a deeply, deeply, deeply psychologically wounded civilization because it forgets its real roots. When you go back to Plato, when you go back to Greece, when you look at Greek philosophy being the real roots of Western civilization… that's deeply intertwined with the esoteric Greek or the esoteric Egyptian and hermetic Egyptian traditions, which are profoundly spiritual and are focused predominantly on the soul. These were the systems that Christ himself was trained in among the Essenes as a profound world soul; a metaphysician of consciousness.

The soul being reunified with the source of all creation. The soul being the individual or the spark or the vessel or the thing within space and time being reunified with the quantum cognitive architecture of the universe itself, which is the formless. It's the eternal dimension… rediscovering that, the ontology of creation.

36:48

That was the framework and that was the fabric of Western civilization when it was created. And that fabric was destroyed by a loss of consciousness, a dislocation from that foundational philosophical architecture which underpinned and undergirded the entire civilizational processes of early Western history. As Dante said, toward mid-life, I lost my way and came upon this wilderness. He is not only describing his life as a transpersonal figure of transfiguration of consciousness through revelation in his mythic Christian mode — a mode of revelation in his time and place of this same ground and property — he is describing the course his entire people and Western history itself, himself, had taken, was taken… is taking.

This is a process of radical rediscovery of humanity through this... actually very destructive, fragmented path of dislocation, which I think necessarily had to occur in one way or another because what we're looking at now is a globalized architecture, a industrialized globalized architecture of digital information. Out from the darkness of Western civilization and history losing its root unity emerges modernity as a colonization of the body of nature and earth with wires and signals. A techne as a dissociated network of veins and synapses; a projected outward mode of the body and root system of the flesh itself.

37:44

Which is why this wire photo is so important. This was transmitted the next day from Havana to Chicago and put in the papers announcing uh really just precipitating Jackie Robinson's arrival.

We have these architectures that were created through this intensely violent dark age, this dark age, which many people would call the Western civilization proper, post its severance from the Greek mythic unity; the deep perception of the psyche and soul embedded in nature. It's a radically unconscious, dislocated, psychologically fragmented process through which humanity transforms very quickly and invents these technologies like the light bulb or like baseball or the wire photo. There are all of these different technological inventions and innovations that emerge from Western civilization through this dislocation psychological fragmentation that now create the situation where Western civilization itself has to actually remember what it did and remember what happened… and reckon with that.

There are tools and technologies that Western civilization has created that can help humanity at this point reach a higher level of transcendental unity than the previous cognitive architectures such as the Mayans or the Aztecs or even the Native Americans — who were living without the laptop or the cell phone as ways of communication; of transporting physical material information, as in code, right, the architecture of the light on the screen, hundreds and thousands of miles across the earth. It is a spiral moment of history to a higher level of architectonic reality and architectural presence through which our powers and capacity of revelation have expanded tenfold.

And that's what a wire photo is. It's literally a wire of the information, which is the image, which is then printed and reproduced almost immediately. To transfer cultural information. To communicate Jackie’s arrival. The break.

These technological advances are our ability to integrate the deep ancient historical information, the cultures of profound spirituality — in terms of search for meaning, search for truth, search for real recognition of humans place in the universe… and as such, how to act, how to be, how to learn, how to live, to understand and cement and found that.

39:42

These technologies in terms of the architecture of science, telescopes, fission devices that currently exist, we can use those mechanisms and methods of sight and insight as prosthetic appendages to understand at a deeper level than ever before and unify through science these ancient metaphysical concepts and achieve a new level of cognition in terms of the holistic reality of the universe itself, the meaning of human being, and the possibility of achieving radical forms of self-awareness within this lifetime. An even deeper perception of the forms and principles that undergird human nature and the existential cosmos.

To foster radical forms of self-awareness within this body in terms of how chemicals and cognition function; thus participating in a more meaningful and holistic way in existence itself.

This is all very fertile ground and we've discussed a lot of it already. A lot of it we've already detailed is that there is — through our new knowledge, through our new sciences, through our new technologies — we are now in a position to radically, radically, radically unify. Not just at a cultural level in terms of a nation or a community, but a global level in terms of humanity itself and a profound recognition of humanity and a profound recognition of life itself even beyond; cosmologically.

It's just a unifying of these different psychological, philosophical and scientific apertures together to present us with a meaning of life with a possibility. An act and force of psychological, existential, and spiritual integration. Teleology.

And Jackie Robinson's just profoundly heroic act and courageous act of stepping onto this stage… and really ending American civilization and presenting us with a post-American world — a world where the stage of America has been intercepted by the truth, intercepted by humanity, profound humanity. Pee Wee Reese puts his hand on Robinson's shoulder. Durocher supports Jackie. Jackie says, the meaning of a life is how it impacts other lives. This is just the most profound humanism that possibly exists. Jackie Robinson's getting berated. Pee Wee Reese puts his hand on his shoulder. Durocher says, if you don't like Jackie Robinson playing, pack it up and leave, because he's going to play.

We're talking about profound humanism in this moment where they're in Cuba preparing for this onslaught, this backlash of cultural and civilizational deep psyche, unprocessed subconscious energy of violation, which is real violence being done to black people in the United States, just profound, profound violence. They're preparing for this profound reckoning of history. This moment is the most important moment in American history to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Obviously the Civil War is incredibly important, but...

42:04

This moment Jackie Robinson enters into the actual cultural institution and dominion of American history and declares himself and becomes one of the greatest players of all time.

42:15

This is a moment… of profound recognition of humanity, which breaks the spells, which really existed as the predominant subconscious culture of American history and American civilization. Forces a reckoning, a reckoning which is still reverberating to this day, because it occurred at and on and upon the most fundamental ground. It wasn't a political idea. It wasn't a law written in a law book. It was Jackie Robinson stepping onto the field of baseball.

That's what I got. Catch you on the next one.

Satchel Paige: Phenomenology of History; Revelation & Revolution of Soul in Clothes of Form

Sep 09, 2025

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00:01

So I want to talk to you about a bit more of a complex topic today. It's the idea of spirit and form — which ties together a conception of historical materialism with a deeper, more metaphysical understanding of the evolution of the spirit through time.

So there's two ideas that I would say historically have not yet really been reconciled — which is the concept of Hegel's spirit, the evolution of spirit through time, and the grounding of spirit in historical materialism through form, which would be the realm of Marx or Walter Benjamin or Lukacs.

This is the idea really that I think we struggle with as a human species to understand — what is the innate spiritual teleology of time. What is the meaning of and meaning in history as a spiritual evolution of the function of being over time as a history of consciousness revolution; consciousness revelation.

00:59

Right? How does spirit move through time? And how does spirit become enlightened through time and thus manifest materially in different form? This is and goes back to the essence. The Platonic ‘time is the moving image of eternity’. What is the secret, or the hidden, sacral essence beyond and behind the curtain or veil of that phenomenological apparition of that unfolding? The clothes of form that time wears and exchanges in and out of appearances of being?

And to me, Satchel Paige, my favorite player of all time… I think one of the most epic and mythic baseball players of all time. He's the sort of Odysseus of baseball, as I would put him — in terms of exile and return. Where he is forced by the nature of the spirit of his time to travel to great lengths. As such, he has this multiplicity of journeys, especially south of the border of the United States, as well as within the United States with black barnstorming teams; the major leagues.

And as you see in this broadside from 1962, returning to the Negro Leagues as they became increasingly barnstorming-based once more — as black baseball in America was before their advent in 1920 — returning even after he had integrated professional American baseball with Robinson, Doby, Minoso; others.

01:58

It was and is a remembrance of black culture, this continuance of the Negro American League baseball, where Satchel Paige was playing with Goose Tatum and the Harlem Stars. He actually returned to play along with the Kansas City Monarchs, his former team of Negro Leagues legend, with which he had great exploits.

You have this epic structure of world baseball history which Satchel Paige witnesses and is prophet to in his exile and return… which is a complexifying of history, a dialectic of progress, so to speak, where you see the spirit of the time and the spirit of the age in America changes, even just during Satchel Paige's career. And this is in explicit and implicit relation to the action and movement of Paige’s career, legacy, and skill upon the diamond itself.

We'll say from 1920 when the Negro Leagues began, all the way up into the late 60s and 70s, where as we well know, the Civil Rights Movement comes into full fruition as well as... new forms of political and student-based activism against the Vietnam War, women's rights, rights for Black Americans. These fermenting revolutionary structures which emerged post-World War II and have a deep connection with the integration of Major League Baseball — which we well know Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige both played very, very important and essential parts in.

What we must witness in terms of this is an evolution of a collective consciousness, a rising in awareness through which, phenomenologically, certain forms appear and reappear — but they reappear in a complexification. They appear again in history buy changed by time as a contextual sphere of emergent information and phenomena. This is the idea of a recurring archetype. A form of the ideal, in the Platonic sense — which intercourses with history and arises differently as a pivot point or an axis of ages. In short, this would be akin to the Promethean function and archetype of the evolution and history and progress of consciousness itself as a bringing of light, revelation; apocalypse — a light bringer in historical form which resolves the contradictions of the time and of the age in regards to embodying and enacting a higher synthesis of the revelation and consciousness of being in practice; archetypally performing the social, cultural, and historical function of that unification in action.

03:49

I have several different photographs in my archive which document Satchel Paige's ‘last ride’, so to speak, in the mid 60s with the Kansas City Athletics — where he returns to Major League Baseball for one last appearance. And you can see here this 1962 broadside where he returns to the Negro Leagues for a series of last appearances. And then of course is inducted into the Major League Hall of Fame in the early 1970s.

Satchel Paige himself as an archetype of the journey, the journeyer or the wanderer as a figure in baseball — as well as the mythic figure of Odysseus… suggests that what he experiences through his career is a complexification of black identity in terms of inclusion and exclusion in American institutions and the creation of the culture of black baseball and the dynamic of the relationship between black baseball and the institutionalized segregated ‘white’ baseball of the early mid and even late 1900s.

What Satchel Paige experiences; a large part of what I believe he represents in the great history of baseball is a figure of profound giftedness, skill, and talent for storytelling. He represents a sort of griot or bardic figure in American baseball history. And through his talent, just through the sheer witness and will of his skill… he has these events where he'll pull the entire field, all of the fielding players off the team and faces each batter individually; face Josh Gibson individually and strike him out, right? This total mastery of the sport of baseball.

05:41

He himself in many ways becomes a singular figure that transcends the spirit of the age and actually propels it forward, much in the way that Jackie Robinson does this when he integrates baseball. Paige is telling not only the story of himself as a mythic ontological force of being that appeals to a transcendent archetypal or willingness of force beyond what appears to be in and the identity of the human, but telling and rewriting the story of baseball in the sheer largesse and grandeur of his presence and action in and upon the field and theatre of its emergence; its social, political, and cosmological function as a cultural device of meaning and meaning making.

For Robinson: the sheer force of will of his character and his determination to succeed, not only for himself, but for others. Remember, Jackie Robinson says the impacted importance of a life is how it impacts others, right? It's a profound ethics, a profound spiritual ethics.

06:10

We witness these figures who appear in history who are manifestations of this gale force wind of progress that themselves propel forward and avail us of a time of deepening and greater complexity. And these figures themselves are our forces of spirit. They are what we would call in ancient metaphysical traditions avatars of spirit, or the force of spirit toward itself. The force of being toward resolution in space and time and amidst rising complexity as revelation of the psyche: the force behind all history. They're forces of this essential spiritual will towards progress.

And Benjamin has a great quote regarding the angel of history who looks back into the ruins even as it presses forward with this gale force wind that we call progress, which is the nature… he's remarking on the nature of Hegelian time, which is the evolution of consciousness through space time.

And so we see these manifestations of progressive complexity and deepening of meaning. They come embodied in form. Leaders of historical movements. Processes which are inextricable from the process of the ontological force and thrust of the movement of the universe itself as in the creation and dialectical resolution of space-time through itself as a movement of consciousness as in awakening to the formlessness or essence beneath and between all phenomenological appearance and appearances of forms. This is the essential inner truth of all spiritual revelation as prophets, sages, mystics. They all return to this essential form of universal cosmic love as the total and totalizing force of being. The cosmic holism of consciousness.

This archetypal deepening of meaning. When you see Satchel Paige return to the Negro Leagues in the early 1960s, after he's helped integrate Major League Baseball — he's returning to the foundations of black baseball, black barnstorming and grassroots baseball, but he's returning differently. You can see here he's wearing his Monarchs uniform. It's an old halftone photograph that's been inserted into the design of this poster. And it's very clearly elucidated: Satchel Paige, the ageless wonder, reputedly the greatest picture of all time.

Page himself has a career that extends far into his late life — and as such he experiences this breadth of transformation in the emergent exponentially increasing complexity of the 20th century and unification through technology and cultural media; himself is a critical and crucial turning point of this transformation by way of the way the aperture of his nature and being and critical engagement with history and the cultural medium of baseball intersects with the spirit of the age as it unfolds and opens; blooms like a flower into new possibilities of integral wholeness — particularly through the civil rights and revolutionary liberation movements of his time; the force of integration as a rising in the critical political consciousness of America at the time as well, alongside the confrontations of a totally global and globalizing world through technology, communication, and information.

07:52

And as we witness this unfolding with Satchel Paige, we're witnessing the transformation of the spirit of the age through the vision of an individual who, in his process and existence and what he represents and brings as a manifest skill and talent to the game of baseball — he himself is a remarkable force of will who is an essential part of this gale wind of progress. And as such, we see him represented multiple times in different ways.

First, as the Negro League star. And in his exploits south of the United States border on various different teams, whether it's a cabinet photo or a studio photograph; a recruit for other talented black American ballplayers to come down and play with him on these international teams and clubs. We see him again represented in magazines — in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States of America, many of which are cut out and pasted upon walls of fans or lovers of baseball. Then we see in the late 1940s, he becomes an institutionalized figure. There are photographs of him released in the picture packs for the Cleveland Indians. He receives a number of baseball card releases, which are again institutionalized symbolic images that represent the game of baseball. He’s been and being canonized as a figure of greatness in this newly integrating and integrated world of modern American professional baseball.

And as his later life progresses, we see him become increasingly integrated into this larger media institution of Major League Baseball in terms of wire photographs, type one photographs by noted photographers… the press releases for him increase alongside the integration of his legend and his achievements as a wanderer outside the bounds of this culture; a black exile or wandering griot who himself stands and has stood for black excellence in baseball for decades. The institution or the city is opening to him — both by force of the nature of his greatness and excellence; the gale force winds of time and progress blowing inevitably towards this essential outcome of recognition of the disjected; exiled.

He's been entered into these, these hollowed gates of the professional baseball institution of the United States. And the interesting thing about this broadside here is it shows him still deeply entwined with the black baseball grassroots of his origins as a professional baseball player, particularly with the Kansas City Monarchs — whom he returns to the field among.

10:04

And this relationship of Paige to his origins — not only of and with black baseball but his literal birthplace; birth origins as an entity or organism or being — is complexified over time because even as he becomes an institutional or institutionalized figure within the totalizing integrating structure of American professional baseball — including with and as his induction into the Hall of Fame, he remains within this deepening legacy of the traveling griot; the barnstorming grassroots of a kind of hermetic consciousness of primordial form. And this connects directly to the legacy and legend of his birth and the history of his life. He refuses institutionalization and commodification of his being and his body into the institutional time of the remark of history. He reclaims his narrative consciousness into myth, legend; the archetypal realm of imagination and the imaginal becoming. And this is tied directly into the deeper nature and substratum and consciousness of legend as in archetypal unfolding of being that his complete narrative arc within and as change agent of baseball directly entails.

This is a very powerful image because it shows even post this cultural integration that Paige still remains deeply entwined with black baseball and black grassroots baseball, even as the collapsing of the two parallel lines of each of these institutions is occurring and has been occurring for the past decade. So what we're talking about there with consciousness, phenomenology, and history is that you have the forces that are not yet integrated into the historical and psychological consciousness of the collective.

And you have this process of integration that occurs that is propelled forward by certain forces, entities, and phenomena in history which serve as contrast. So the contrast of Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson, and Satchel Paige playing for the Homestead Grays or the Kansas City Monarchs; the contrast of the 1939 or 1930s East-West All-Star games for the Negro Leagues — sometimes; often outdrawing the Major League professional All-Star games.

The inevitability that comes from World War II and the statements made after by the commissioner of Major League Baseball that if Black men can fight side by side along white men in this conflict, this conflict of World War II, they certainly can play on the same field together in Major League Baseball.

11:38

You see this necessary complexification of history through phenomena, which itself is a revelation of the quality of spirit as a force of unity.

12:08

So this is kind of the hidden key that connects the mystical metaphysician Hegel with Benjamin, Marx, and Lukacs, who are more often considered historical materialist philosophers, historians, and even economists. Because what Hegel is telling us and showing us is that the force of history is far more profound than just what it appears to be.

12:35

It's rather a necessary phenomena itself in a grand cosmological sense of the reunification of seemingly separate, disparate objects in the grand cosmos which are themselves all spirit embodied in form as soul. Soul here being the manifestation or manifest phenomenological form and body which appears sensate as difference.

So what I mean by that is that spirit embodied by; in form as soul is the vertical well of spirit downward — in a metaphysical sense of orientation and space, where spirit becomes incarnated into form and it transforms and transmutes through a rising of the ladder of the genetic structure and architecture of the organism… to create a deepening of understanding that that organism or that historical material phenomena itself is not at all separate from the unfolding of the universe proper as a complexification, as a compounding of information. This is, in short, a rising in spiritual consciousness; metaphysical consciousness and revelation of the hidden architecture of being and time proper.

And this itself is most clearly represented in genes and genetics, as an evolutionary unfolding through time as a ladder of information.

13:31

When you look at this just purely on a scientific level, I think it makes much more sense, but it's difficult to translate into historical materialism and phenomenology because you look at the course of human history and maybe your first instinct or impulse would be to say, history doesn't make any sense. It's not logical. It's not linear, right? It doesn't have any meaning behind it. It's just this chaos of evolution of the biosphere. Things are born and die and maybe develop opposable thumbs or change speciation. Nothing's happening or nothing's changing at a deeper level beyond this phenomenological, Darwinian appearance of different beings in and through time.

But when you look at history, even from a microscopic level, in terms of Paige and Paige's history in the span of maybe 40, 45 years of Major League Baseball and Negro League Baseball, you can see — just in the span of his lifetime — what the force of his will, his skill, and his ability does, even just through that individual, as an aperture which shifts the lens.

14:29

1970s, he's inducted into Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the earliest black baseball players to be inducted. You see this witnessing of the historical and political consciousness of the collective, which integrates Satchel Page, both literally and metaphorically, into its psychic architecture. Satchel Paige himself becomes known as, I would say, arguably the greatest pitcher of all time, both by exploits and both by myth. And all the while, he is entirely unknown to the world. The metaphysical architecture of his being is mythic; in the realm of the griot. He articulates the secret nature and the essence of his being as supra-historical back to history. He himself is a self-generative agent of change — not only to the phenomenological structure of reality as in history and baseball history as an integral force of will and skill and cultural legend — but to the phenomenological structure of being as perception, elucidation, and self creation.

And in this process, he's almost ahead of history. Satchel Paige himself is almost a vanguard moment in history and the historical consciousness because he's a revelation of the spirit almost before its time. He’s a transcendental force amidst a real ground of his birth in the poor black South; early childhood delinquency and trouble; the creation of a force of being which disrupts the current and currency of the perceived; perception of reality.

15:25

So when we're looking at this phenomenological unfolding of history and time, it's kind of easy, in a way — that if we're not examining it or we're not doing a profound inquiry into it, we can say that it just doesn't make any sense and there is no progress that's occurring.

But when we look at real historical movements, and I think again, black baseball and the intersection with Major League Baseball and integration through the lens of Satchel Paige is such a profound way to look at this — is that you're witnessing… even just in terms of the consciousness of Satchel Paige himself as an entity and an aperture and a baseball player on this cosmic stage of play and becoming, you're witnessing a shift in inclusion and exclusion at a psychic level. Who and what constitutes the self. Culturally, politically, existentially.

And here we're just kind of looking at it culturally, as in who is included and who is excluded in terms of in and out groups. This is typically the aperture of history as a phenomenological surface of shifting relationships of beings and bodies in space and time. But at a deeper level, we're looking at what is included in the psychic architecture of how we conceive of ourselves as a species or a cosmological phenomenon.

16:24

So you're witnessing in this way a metabolism through history, which is an expansion of the consciousness of the organism or of history of humanity or of the cosmos — in the same way that you look at the genetic architecture of a human being becoming complexified with the advent and inclusion of the forebrain hundreds of thousands of years ago.

You're looking at that process which is occurring at a kind of meta-macrocosmic level in terms of the evolution of the literal form or the phenomenological appearance of the organism itself proper. But you're looking at that translated through the seeming movement of events and phenomena and processes that occur historically as in they appear sensate and sensate relevant to the human nexus of being — such as wars or baseball history or the creation and dissolution of nations and empires and cultures and narratives and stories and religions.

These are all ways that the cognitive architecture of humanity itself is becoming radically complexified and is resolving itself through complexity as a process of digestion or metaphorical consumption of archetypes, symbols, phenomena, images — which itself is a process of the developing or organizing psyche of the collective organism or the universe itself, processing perceived difference as separation and incorporating that into a profound transcendental unity of consciousness. This is a mutual hyperacceleration of the creative diversion and diversity of phenomena with the ‘breaking open’ of the psyche at this sort of warp and light speed of total divestment of the spirit into multiplicity; perennial apertures of form. This extreme difference is what, at root, overwhelms the psyche unto and toward psychic wholeness. A breaking open of the cognitive aperture and perception of the organismic being unto and toward enlightenment. And this too is the revelation of history.

This is what Hegel suggests as the approaching singularity or the absolute as it occurs as a sort of end of history or end of time. And it's important to not interpret this quote ‘incorrectly’ or read this wrong because that itself is an apocalyptic event as in a sort of essential enlightenment to the foundations of history, the essence of history — which itself is spirit changing form and transforming through, fundamentally… through psyche, through the architecture of psyche, through the architecture of revelation and consciousness itself of phenomena, through phenomena and with phenomena.

The phenomena is a body, it is a form, and that form is a metabolizing force that is essential to the architecture of the universe itself — in the same way that we're talking about the metabolism of the body as it relates to the thermonuclear structure of stars. These are the same energetic principles occurring at scales… which are including, incorporating, and consuming energy as a part of a larger metastructural process of existence itself.

And through that incorporation and consumption of energy, the form itself changes. The phenomena itself changes, as you can clearly see with food and water in the body, just the same as the way that the literal architecture of the sun and the earth shift through time and energetic profusion, transfusion; diffusion. This is all observable phenomena, which science utilizes regularly to understand, perceive, and attempt to grasp and digest the architecture of reality.

19:15

So again, when we go back to the Satchel Paige broadside and historical material phenomena, this is connecting history with the essential nature of the spirit of time. You're looking at this radically complexifying architecture of symbols, signs, and archetypes through which Satchel Paige evolves as a individual, historical, political, and cultural phenomenon. He not only evolves through them, but is actively rewriting them as a historical presence that disrupts foundational mechanisms of socio-cultural perception and collective identity construction. He is an artist of consciousness and transformer of the political rhythm making of human society and identity.

He is observed here as the ageless wonder, the greatest pitcher of all time. He's wearing a Monarchs uniform, and he's returning to the site of his origins — to participate in black grassroots baseball even after integration has occurred. He’s returning wearing the clothes of history. Marx says history happens once as tragedy, twice as farce. In a Hegelian sense, we can deepen this metaphor. History happens once as being in time; twice as being’s recognition of the meaning of time — and thus, history is broken open archetypally, somatically, psychologically — at the profound level of consciousness, reality, and the origins of meaning and being proper. This is true, profound, spiritual revolution of being and meaning of being.

This is a really profound movement — Paige’s exile and return and the deepening of reunification, the weaving movement — which shows this kind of spiral architecture of the stairs or the ladder of history through which these perennial archetypes recur, such as exile and return. Satchel Paige returns to these origins of separation through and after a deep psychic collective unity and unification process to represent a profound complexification of what it means to be in; participate in; be black baseball — and why black baseball exists as a cultural phenomenon and continues to exist. He returns wearing the same clothes of history, but he is Satchel Paige, the unifier of psyche, the Odyssean returned to Ithaca after 20 years at sea.

And what it means for Satchel Paige to be an essential figure in that process, not only championing it, right, being one of the primary and primordial archetypes of it… but also in his ability and force through black baseball as a grassroots movement to make possible for integration — as a trailblazing force of consciousness which reveals phenomenologically through movement a deeper hidden force of unity; makes said force undeniable and undeniably apparent as revelation to the sensate eye.

21:09

The rising of historical consciousness of Satchel Paige and Satchel Paige himself as radical form of supra-historical consciousness across all of baseball itself is one of the primary drivers of integration in baseball history. You have scouts looking at Joe DiMaggio as he's coming up and he goes one for four against Paige and they say, DiMaggio goes one for four against Page. He's a good hitter. Against that standard of Paige's greatness and his excellence.

And this is clear, right? This becomes increasingly historically clear, and it's an undeniable force. He draws massive crowds to whichever diamond or team he is playing for this week. Wherever he goes. He himself becomes representative of the early emergent and emerging international legacy of modern baseball. Across borders, countries, races.

This is incredibly powerful when you think about baseball history and the force of Satchel Paige himself, because it shows that history is moved forward by these heroic achievements — which is why I suggest Satchel Paige is Odysseus. The heroic achievement of Paige himself through baseball is a rising in consciousness which not only impacts the culture of baseball and the cultural history of baseball, but it actually impacts the cultural and political consciousness of America itself. And by consequence, just by the literal network and nature of consciousness, it's not bound or delineated by borders. It seeps through everything. It's a historical, eternal force that it... it transcends all attempts to box it in or force it to exist in certain parameters — as we can see through evolution, right?

Historical forms change through time in terms of just even the evolution of species as Darwin puts it.

Paige’s force of will as a consciousness phenomenon — it's something that actually changes the consciousness of history and reroutes how history unfolds.

22:59

This is incredibly powerful. And there's a deep sense of agency in consciousness in terms of the way that behavior functions and the way that we act. There's a ethics of consciousness wherein we're moving towards integration already as a historical and universal principle. And as such, our behavior towards integration is essential and that we align with that underlying universal teleological force toward that absolute — toward that singularity of spirit revealing and having revelation of itself in history and in time through form. We’re therein hyperaccelerating the intuitive force and capacity of the emerging and emergent consciousness universe itself. We’re actively participating in the purpose and soul of evolution of all things; all space and all time — the imperative beneath all nature and all existence.

This is again, this is kind of the essential metaphysics of Christ and the appearance of Christ in time or in history or in space is to suggest that the Son of God appears in the world. This is exactly what Hegel's talking about. It's the singularity which unifies spirit and form. Which unifies the eternal architecture of consciousness with the immediate presence of phenomena. And this is the work that Satchel Paige is doing. Knowingly or unknowingly; same with Jackie Robinson, right? Is that through the cultural form of baseball as play, it becomes a field of revelation for the history of the spirit.

24:21

Just as much as the play of all of human history, the play of war, or as Shakespeare says, all of the world is a stage. And all of the men and women are but players on that stage, right? This is what is suggested. Profound. Because of course Shakespeare is before Hegel — where he's saying that the world history or all that is phenomenologically is a theater, but he doesn't necessarily state why.

A theater for what? But it's a theater for the evolution of consciousness. That world history is a phenomenological unfolding, all of which is just a dialectic of relationship, which Einstein later states with his theory of relativity. Bodies in space are almost constituted by the way that they relate in space and in time, and the way that they relate is through scientific force, The way that they relate is through physical force, which is the gravitational fields and the literal architecture of their bodies in space and in time. And that changes over time, again… whether that's asteroids, whether that's planetary formations, whether that's star systems.

That's a cosmological system in flux, which means the thermodynamics of that system are rapidly changing and shifting because the way that energy flows through them is complexifying. And again, those systems aren't closed, which means things and phenomena and energy enter into them and exit from them in a way that is compounded and predicted by the massive architecture of the universe proper.

There's systems within systems within systems. So in this way, when we look at history, history itself is the sort of mirror of consciousness and the mirror of evolution — because we look at the phenomena that emerged through it and how sort of symphonic movements of history began and are resolved, such as the creation of Negro League baseball from black barnstorming. And even from earlier, the way that black baseball players were… baseball was already integrated in the late 1800s to a degree, right, to a very minor degree. The racism was exceptionally strong. But players like Fleet Walker and Bud Fowler played in the American professional leagues.

There was then an official ban on black baseball players in quote unquote, American professional baseball. And then you have this dialectical movement and relationship between the segregated white professional league and then the rapidly burgeoning black professional league through organization of barnstorming teams and the work of Rube Foster. And the inevitable resolution of these two archetypal forms, this dialectic; this pseudo-dualism — which is pressed on and forward by figures like Josh Gibson, Paige, the East-West All-Star game, Jackie Robinson, Jose Mendez from Cuba.

27:08

You have these movements — which are a unity, separation, unity, separation construct, again… as why I state exile and return as a profound archetypal phenomenon. But in this unity, separation, unity, separation, in the same way that we look at larger planetary cycles, the movement of planets in dialectical relation in space-time propelled by the movement of our star, the sun, through the universal architecture, through the galactic architecture toward the galactic center.

The same way that you have that essential planetary movement of cyclical evolution or revolution, it's not standing still in space and in time, it's a spiral form. It is moving toward a hidden or unknown end, insofar as a our best sciences know it; perhaps not entirely unknown insofar as our best metaphysicians and mystics know it — even in a space-time sense.

And that spiral form is a complexifying of the unity and separation as a form of evolution, a teleological, dialectical evolution of phenomena, of soul and form as it expands and contracts, expands and contracts, but becomes complexified through that dialectical movement in space-time. We return to the primordial void, time and time again; return to the well to see the face of the abyss; the hidden within the seeming substance of time. This is a sort of phenomenology of the black hole architecture of the self and of the soul; consumption as revolution and revelation of being as in an ouroboros of energy. Through all of this, we are asking ourselves — what is the spiritual or metaphysical meaning of phenomenology?

28:06

So this is kind of a, it's a complex thing to talk about, but it's just easily, it's very easily seen in Satchel Paige, even specifically through this broadside. He's wearing that Kansas City Monarchs uniform of old and he's returning, right, again, to the site of the Negro Leagues, even as they're disbanding post-integration. It's a reification of the theme, the emergent theme, which is unified within the integrative structure of American politics; professional baseball in the late 1940s into the early 1950s. This is a protracted period of profound consciousness evolution — wherein you can see the reactionary force of its breakthrough at work headed into the 21st century like the recoil of a shotgun. The wall breaks through impact of the bullet, but the gun recoils and pushes the aperture of the collective back into a recapitulation of the former.

But you can see the complexity through time of who Satchel Paige becomes and what Satchel Paige becomes through the aperture and lens of baseball and culture. And what it means for him to return to the site of the Negro Leagues to barnstorm, even post integration of baseball — where he becomes a quote unquote major league baseball player… these are phenomena which, through the nature of the history of difference and the return to unity in the history of difference and the return to unity — is consciousness' attempt to reconcile perceived difference into an architecture of unity, into an architecture of conscious unity and conscious soul within form. It’s the paradox of spirit in form and the revelation of spirit in form. Of contrast in embodiment of unity.

Again, you have something like the nature of the evolution of Christ as a historical phenomena and then what happens after Christ in terms of Rome and Christianity. You have these phenomenological material appearances, often through individuals, who transcend or defy the perceived historical bridges of difference. Avatars of consciousness who reveal the unity of soul and spirit within form; the redoubling of historical consciousness in a recoiling of the gun of history in attempts to reconcile and even recoiling at the profundity and revelation of that recollection; the paradox which reorders consciousness at the level of the universe. Archetypal unity within ephemeral form. The phenomenological revelation of the transcendent; the transcendental principle in incarnation.

And then what has to happen culturally and collectively and psychologically is that there has to be a metabolism of this defiance of the previous architecture of the structure of consciousness itself. It’s a breakthrough moment ordered and organized by history as a convergence of historical phenomena and events to revelate and expose the inevitability of the truth through the aperture of history as a reordering of consciousness through revelation of history. This is why, Biblically, the revelation is ordered and organized as a momentous physical event which has real physical characteristics and historical attributes. It is ordered in time to reveal truth. These apocalyptic moments are benchmarks of human revelation toward the architecture of the cosmos, the universe, and spirit proper.

So when we're talking about the experience of fragmentation, which is something that I would say is native to humanity and human consciousness — just due to the nature of, right, we're born and we look up at the sky and we perceive a separation from God. We're born and we're born from the womb of history and we look up into history; in the sky, and look backwards into history… and perceive this separation from which we are attempting to reconcile that difference. It’s the birth from the womb so much as being thrown into the entire history of evolutionary consciousness and then trying to, from that point, order and make the form and teleology of history and time intelligible to the aperture and framework of sense ordered and neuro ordered human consciousness proper. This is a formidable task to the universe in the form of a babe; a evolving, flesh organism with new techne in the form of brain, limbs, eyes, nose, ears.

To reconcile how history has occurred and can occur — and what has been lost through the rubble and the ruin of history. The depths of this forgetting and time are incarnate of and through the history of the abyss as body. The body remembers all of evolution and time as evolutionary information. Genetic information. A scaffolding of species level revelation through the consciousness history of time as in the body.

And at the same time, what we're moving forward towards, we don't understand, right? We don't understand death or the metaphysical architecture or meaning of a black hole. We're existing within this kind of narrow range through which we touch a stove and it's hot, or we perceive the feeling of hunger in our bodies, right? This is the attempt to learn and understand that which is far beyond the architecture of our existing consciousness. We’re between worlds and conscious of this narrow tunnel of the framework of human life, even as the seeming ground beneath us shifts into an entirely new and ulterior ontology and form of being. We are being uprooted from this temporary form, both in death and evolution, in that which we truly are beneath the seeming substance of the truths and truisms which carry us from birth to consumption to reproduction to death.

Far beyond the architecture of our genetic ability and our foresight and our hindsight and the senses and sensations of the human body which dictate most of the everyday… kind of routine and rigmarole and rhythm of life itself.

31:26

But we perceive the truth of history, right, in terms of the evolution of consciousness through this increasing understanding, this understanding of really… it's something like pattern recognition, understanding how history unfolds at a grand scale and then, of course, within our own lives as a personal principle of the recognition and re-confrontation with the quote unquote essential monsters of our lives, which are the undigested and disjected psychological principles which we have not yet integrated within ourselves.

And this essential fragmentation occurs again at the personal, the collective, at the ancestral and at the supra species cosmic consciousness level as a historical phenomena of the creation of the universe, the separation of the universe into independent bodies in the attempt to reconcile those independent bodies as a awareness or consciousness of that essential architecture of separation and as such the creation and formation of a psychological unity — even within the perceived complexity of the phenomenological unfolding of the universe itself. History, as Marx intuits, repeats itself — but through the unconscious patterns and patterning of the psyche as in a disjected fragmentation and, of, and through which the parts or scattered glass and fragments must be recovered through psychic recollection at a collective level as historical revelation — a historical material Dionysus or Osiris project of consciousness in and through time which directly reunites us with the source, a priori moment of all being and time itself. A direct revelation of the interior of all being itself as in enlightenment revelation and true and total presence of the essence of being. A timeless revelation; a spiritual quantum mechanical sort of a priori form of existence which is and is as in all things at root and fount and essence of being.

Again, right, this is what's interesting — is that phenomenologically it's not so much being called to an absolution or a death of phenomenology or the construct or appearance or creation of forms. We’re not talking about an absolution of existence as phenomenological appearance or formation. In fact, we're increasingly expanding and complexifying our awareness in terms of consciousness and the architecture of the universe itself. And with and alongside that is the increasing diversity of forms and statuses and states of existence as the creative diversive, diffusive superposition of the cosmos itself as an entity… as it unfolds even as a thermodynamic principle, the solidification and cooling of the experiential process of the universe itself as a heat system of creation of and through elemental forms, change, and dynamics of physics.

We're more so being called to revelate that psychologically — the a priori superstructure of being proper as a cosmological entity. A totality within the details. So when we're talking about revelation or apocalypse or psychedelic revealing, we're talking about the psyche experiencing the truth of this profound nature of the unified cosmological wholeness of existence as a aperture of experience which we are experiencing — even through this perceived separation as the organism itself as a sort of microscope or telescope into the mystery of the cosmos and the mystery of existence… and we see that occurring consistently and constantly through history.

33:45

And that's what Hegel is calling the spirit. The spirit as it's manifest in history itself and human history — because human history is the field of and through which we are exploring that phenomena. So whether it's through technology, whether it's through art, whether it's through baseball — we're looking at all of these different ways, which are apertures and lenses through which we are creating prosthetics… prosthetic webs and networks such as the internet or telephone wiring to experience this reality of unity and this reality of wholeness even at a quantum mechanical level — to experience it through the aperture of the physical.

Which again is grounded in in material or the creation of material and the process of that revelation through which Spirit actually is able to retroactively — through cognition and through awareness — reunite with that psychic quantum mechanical architecture of the universe and as such actually alter its architecture, right? We’re looking back in through time at the originary moment and mechanism and cosmological principle and foundation of the creative essence of all time and the universe and finding timelessness within time; spacelessness within form. The origin-source of the creative pregnant essence and energy in all of creation as in the immediate presence; as such, participate and participating directly and intimately with the nature of the universe itself and not be determined by it, right?

Predirected and predetermined by it as in the species itself unfolding unconsciously as a natural imperative, the process of dialectical redoubling — again, as Kierkegaard calls it — to be able to reflect upon the cosmic architecture of the nature of existence itself in terms of genetics, quantum mechanics, Hegel's spirit of history or spirit of time — and then within that process of awareness and understanding the teleology of existence itself, entering into that process of the creation of being itself as in history and experience consciously us ourselves changing the time through the metabolic fabric and framework of consciousness itself and participating actively in the awareness of that which we know we are — our true identity in a cosmological, phenomenological, historical sense. This is the historical singularity of consciousness which is itself the birth of a new time, a transcendental telos, a Kairotic time.

35:40

It's incredibly powerful, right? And so Satchel Paige is almost like the bardic or the griotic agent of that. Just in terms of his… the way in which he speaks, the sort of a metaphorical, legendary storytelling essence of the figure of which he constructs himself in history and in time… he's almost Odysseus' Nobody in the cave, right, with the cyclops.

He constructs and reconstructs his identity at will and at force in order to be an as an agent of consciousness. It's incredibly powerful. He's a very spiritually advanced figure in baseball… where he comes from in terms of his roots in the deep American South in the early 1900s; who he becomes as a figure of baseball consciousness that transcends the perceived dualities at the time as much as they try to cage him in. The organizing spirit of the age is something he refuses. He forges; trailblazes… and as such, reorders the cosmos.

There's this whole discourse around his age. And there's so many things about his life that he tells. They remain unclear, but he tells. And his stories themselves change because he's opened himself up as this figure of revolutionary consciousness that occurs within the architecture of baseball as a cultural form… but ripples out in great magnitudes in terms of the historical, political, and collective consciousness of humanity and existence itself. He makes life; makes himself out of the creative, ingenuitive foundations of the force of his being himself. The self determining will and force of Paige — in that mythic consciousness, becomes the deepest ontological root of baseball. The ground magnet and swell through which it reorganizes and reorders itself in the aperture and magnitude of a single individual.

37:07

This essential force is what we're talking about. The force of being; the conscious identity and identification of and with it as the ordering and organizing force of transcendental history and Kairotic time.

So Satchel Paige himself as consciousness is a sort of radical transcendental form or transcending form which pulls the drag of human history itself in the wind, in the gale force wind of progress into the future of a deeper unity. Even a more complex unity, but a deeper unity nonetheless in its complexity. It breaks the existing forms and bounds — and through that breaking, creates a sort of transcendental whole in the form of Paige as a transcendent, mythic body of consciousness which itself is constantly shifting… an almost chameleonic presence. He is dictating from within the creative principles of life. I’ll take a headline from a Harriet Tubman exhibit — a conductor of the underground railroad of the metaphysical creation of existence proper. The prime mover and movement of the force of the creative will as in Spirit which is the revelation beyond and behind the change of time as the barreling of the spirit of the age toward the witnessing of the primordial spirit itself incarnate phenomenologically as in a paradox of the container and the eternally uncontained.

38:06

So this broadside I think is incredibly profound and exemplifies this dialectical tension between the historical material phenomenology of human history and the grand architecture of spirit as a cosmological history of existence itself — and how that grounds itself down and manifests itself in scales through human history as a revolutionary overturning of consciousness… and as such, the changing of phenomenology through this inevitable collision course of perceived opposites or constructed differences which exist in and as a sort of frictive tension as much as tectonic plates in terms of the underground of the earth, which are naturally seeking to achieve resolution even in conflict.

Therein, we have bodies in space which are internally and integrally in wholeness and themselves manifestations of that a priori principle; yet are acting out a natural unconsciousness of striving towards it in various different evolutionary or biological or teleological or Newtonian; Darwinian — even Freudian and Jungian — ways of establishing or attaining that wholeness as in self realization. What is essential is the realization of the phenomenological itself being a playground or a proving ground of the spirit; therein, a theatre of consciousness wherein this inevitability of the deeper truth and substratum of existence emerges as an integral, psychic one — and thus, fundamentally a spiritual one of consciousness, awareness, and revelation through phenomenological appearance of form that is an archetypal reactory as in the mirror of history to the psychological state, status, and category of organismic development unto wholeness.

And this is the nature of force as it exists in space-time, where masses of bodies are in this perennial dance of unification in perceived wholeness of space-time and opposition and difference, as we discussed with the movement of the planets, the solar system — through the galactic architecture of the Milky Way or the realm in which we live.

39:03

This is manifest all across scales. That movement, history itself, is just the stage, again — as Shakespeare said it, for this phenomenology to unfold this story of perceived separation and difference into a cosmological wholeness of unity as in a singularity, that the true force of history is all movement toward the revelation of the psyche.

The revelation of the psyche as manifest within all space and all time as really a spiritual process of the revelation of the true nature of that which is, right? This is what all of our science is, our culture, all of the foundations of human life are headed towards inevitably. Being just pushed again by the gale force wind of history and time and even just biological evolution as a unconsciously unfolding process of imperatives of the organism and underlying those imperatives are, again, that same essential architecture which is the metabolism of the cosmos.

That all spirit must necessarily change form through physical flux and thus ephemeral container of phenomenological form as mutually interacting and reacting systems in physis — and in changing form it actually self-revelates… even just in the advent of the forebrain, again. It self-revelates itself and in the complexifying of the genome there is increased possibility for revelation. This is something that's already occurring in the unconscious nature and architecture of existence itself — and this is also why we observe it historically as a phenomenological principle which undergirds all of history towards progress, towards knowledge of the true nature and the architecture of consciousness itself — whether that's through technology, the digital world, whether that's through war, whether that's through culture, such as baseball.

40:50

The integration of baseball and the world history of baseball. Because it's something that as we become conscious of it, we can be participating change agents in it and move ourselves consciously through it, toward it; as embodiments of it in psychic unity. Through awareness — with an efficiency, a swiftness and a real directive…. a real spiritual knowledge toward this unfolding of this process in our lifetime.

This is kind of what it means to be a revolutionary human being. But it's also something that's occurring unconsciously, right? And it's unfolding as a sort of native metastructural process of the psyche and the cosmos proper. The psyche and the cosmos are unifying. We look up at the sky, we say, oh, we must be separate from God, or that the stories of history are occurring abstractly or mythologically. They're occurring within the stars as a metaphorical construct, an archetype of our separation from this grand spirituality or grand spiritual unfolding of the cosmos.

What we are revelating and realizing through history is that we are that process innately. And so we're returning to and retaining the archetypes and the mythological systems which we created in an ancient historical sense to depict this grand genesis and unfolding of the creation of the universe — returning them to the historical material body of human history and consciousness itself — and realizing that the mythological processes that we depicted…. sometimes those are just looked at as stories or images. Now, and in a modern sense, realizing that those archetypal mythological images themselves are the process of spirit and history. Recollecting them in and toward our modern consciousness for what is really going on in this life, as this life.

They are the mirror or the metaphor of the phenomenological process of spirit and history and the utter importance of the evolution of the soul, right, towards the spirit — and the unification of that within time. That's our enlightenment. Especially as it occurs through the experience of the trauma of separation, the trauma of wounding or the trauma of violence which convinces us that we are away from God or apart from this great metaphysical process of the creation and unfolding of source, the essence of all of existence itself. This is easy to experience historically through war, through abuse, through trauma.

Again, through the creation of black baseball as a profoundly segregating and violent force of exclusion, which is experienced politically, socially, and culturally through the Jim Crow era racism and violence that occurs in America. To know that this is what is undergirding us is to create a profoundly new historical possibility. It's a sort of salve that allows us to live within the hyper-real, the super-real spiritual and psychological unfolding and process of history and of time and of humanity itself.

Living within this essential kind of spiritual source-based identity, this eternal formless truth within the ephemeral suit of the appearance of form — which again is the phenomenology of history and the phenomenology of spirit. And in doing so, redirect our energies and our consciousness towards the most profound, impactful, and meaningful imperative — which is the truth of our nature… and as such to live more profound and healing lives and meaningful lives.

44:42

But again, as we see through history, even unconsciously — something like the form of this broadside from its design to its metaphysical and archetypal meaning of Satchel Paige as the one who is exiled and returns… as the Odysseus, or the griot of baseball history — even just in his storytelling himself, the Homeric quality of him — is itself already a profound, profound, profound manifestation of the spirit and the triumph of progress. And it was done through the nature and work and art of unconscious time as a process of profound metaphysical evolution through the phenomenological encounter of spirit with form; gazing through form into the abyssal void and unity and matrix of all of creation and life itself. And in its metabolism of forgetting, the creation of a profound unity through the incarnate experience of space-time; the achievement of profound paradox as in resolution of spirit and form — ephemeral and eternal, through the aperture of creation itself as a lens to see, know, witness, and be.

The triumph of evolution and the unity and wholeness of consciousness through history and through time. We already live within this undergirding, but for us to step deeply and more deeply into it, we ourselves are entering into a profound articulation of a new world which changes everything in the most beautiful way — because we become knowing and we become known in this grand and profound architecture of the design of the universe itself… and become truly unified within spirit towards ourselves.

EPILOGUE:

Jake Daubert & The Alchemical Gold: Diamonds Forged From Coal

Aug 15, 2025

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00:02

So this is a huge episode and it's been in the works for a long time. The title that I'm going to use is Jake Daubert, the alchemical gold: diamonds forged from coal. We're going to get around to the main concept, which is a refinement of character and the idea of human nature as a forge for the refinement of character.

And nothing to me… really, even in modern history, nonetheless baseball history, even going back to kind of the mythological foundations of Western civilization, whether that's Hercules or Perseus or Sisyphus… encompasses this in full quite like Daubert’s life and career. You could look at those mythological archetypes and make a claim and say — they are the foundational blueprints that tell us what humanity is about and what humanity means on a spiritual level, right?

00:58

What the process of human striving, human nature, the evolution of humanity, all of our cultures and civilizations is. What we're here for and what we're doing. So those archetypes lay a sort of spiritual foundational blueprint. They're the stories that our cultures tell about the meaning of life and the reason for human action, not just in terms of the basic physical and biological excretions, reproductions, consumptions — the things that we do to sustain the body as a thermodynamic engine — but furthermore, the reason for that sustenance. It's the spiritual bread, so to speak, as Christ puts it in his passages.

So when we're looking at this phenomenon, I've really zeroed in here on the coal mining towns of the Appalachian in the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And I have highlighted here a photographic postcard from Shamokin, Pennsylvania. And we've discussed this. This is where both Stan Coveleski — the first figure that we talked about with this mythic spiritual undertone of the ascent through the mines comes from — as well as Jake Daubert.

So we'll describe Jake Daubert in more detail here, but that postcard depicts a couple of the breaker boys. And you can see that they're very young. They must be from the ages of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. And they're working with the dinkies. The dinkies are the transportation trains that would move this coal from the mines and from the collieries.

02:50

Let see if I can distill this. It's a very powerful time, not only in human history, but American history — because the movement of global industrialization, as well as the industrialization of America, functions very differently than anything historically.

So you have the slavery in the American South, which forms the economic agricultural foundation, kind of the root infrastructure when you think of early American history. And of course you're really looking at a history of exploitation. And that slavery in the American South is being performed predominantly by black slaves who have been brought over to the United States via the transatlantic slave trade.

When you look at what's actually happening in the Northeast in this kind of coal mining passage of the Appalachian, predominantly Pennsylvania; stretches of West Virginia — when you're looking at that coal mining passage as a geographical construct and territory; time and place in history — you're looking at these towns that were actually settled predominantly by different European immigrant groups. And they basically immediately descended into these mines and performed these intense tasks in the bowels of the earth to harvest this coal as the energy solution to industrialization.

So if you think about it, you're entering into a period of time in human history, which is a form of metallurgy, right? It's a use of coal, which then in large part just gets transported a little bit down the road, so to speak, to Pittsburgh for the steel production which is literally the foundation of American industrialization. When you think of the skyscrapers, when you think of the cars, the automobiles, everything is from this metallurgy, right? This base form. And you can see this metallurgy translate into the creation of advanced computation devices as we advance in and into the 20th century, right?

Computers with their chips and the way that they're structured are an advanced metallurgy, an advanced industrial metallurgy, which actually ties directly back to this steel city. Again, the Pittsburgh nickname is almost too apt, the steel city which undergirds the industrialization of American civilization.

05:15

It's a very powerful moment in time in American history, and it's a highly exploitative time. The immigrants that work in these mines work entirely under the jurisdiction of the mine owners. So they live in mining towns, they live in coal mining towns. The entire towns themselves, the industry is coal mining, and the money they get or they receive is gonna be a dollar a week for 12 to 14 hours; maybe $3 a week for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week in the mines — especially as a breaker boy, which Daubert and Coveleski both were at the ages of 11 and 12.

They're deep in these mines breaking coal for 14 hours a day. So you're either receiving that dollar amount or you're receiving something called scrip in the equivalent amount — which is company backed ‘money’. You go to the company store; you purchase from within the company infrastructure and that money doesn't translate anywhere else.

So it's a form of deep indentured servitude; a pretty profound form of slavery because your entire economic, social, and political circumstances and possibilities are tied to your ability to use that money to create difference for yourself. And if you're using a company backed money, all of your work and all of your labor just goes directly back into the company itself. There’s no possibility for real alternative.

There is no ability to take that money and move elsewhere or go elsewhere or create something elsewhere. And the money in the first place is so little that going or creating something elsewhere is just not possible.

07:09

So you look at these circumstances — and Jake Daubert is a fascinating figure to discuss this because you have this incredibly exploitative moment and movement, especially in terms of child labor, which is what we're zeroing in on with both Daubert and Coveleski.

They're working at ages 11 and 12 in these these mines — deep deep in these dark mines — for over half of the 24 hour day for all of their days except for one, which is probably going to be Sunday there. And you can see, I think with Daubert — it's much more apparent and representative. Coveleski's character is something we discussed a little bit in previous episodes, but Daubert's character is so profoundly telling because of who he grows up to be in a public, collective sense. He grows up to be a labor leader in baseball. He grows up to be perhaps one of the most upstanding and outstanding citizens in the arena of baseball itself: not only standing up for, of course, his personal rights, but standing up for the rights of his fellow ballplayer. Very closely tied to his community roots; very in tune with a grounded ethical perspective of being in commmunity; the suffering and needs of his fellow human being therein and accordingly.

08:08

And you can see, especially when you go into his biography (I don’t want to go into it too much here, because we’re making more of a metaphysical ledger of his being)… you can see when you go into his biography, the character that has been forged and the character that's created. And I want to say, of course, some of that comes from the innate person; who you are, your outlook, and your perspective — and the way that you see things just at a biological or even a spiritual level. But a lot of that — who he was and became — I think, comes from his experiences.

His experiences in the mines, working with his fellow breaker boys at ages 11 and 12. The amount of hardship that this man truly had to undergo. His life and his metabolism of his incarnate life and life experience at a spiritual, psychic level creates someone who actually becomes the fabric, in a lot of ways, of the end part of dead ball baseball going into the 1920s with the start of the live ball era.

You can see the impact that he has. I mean, obviously he's a very talented player, first of all — but you can see the impact he has in terms of his leadership and his character as it impacts the entire ecosystem of baseball. Not just his team leadership in terms of captaincy; his skill and intellect and vision and presence of being on the field and in the clubhouse. But his total vision of baseball and what it means to participate ethically and stand up for what is right and just at a macrocosmic level. And that's really what I focused in on, because it's something that's mentioned so often that it almost unfairly eclipses his achievements on the field.

He was never elected to the Hall of Fame, but has a very strong case for that. If not just for his play on the field, but also for his impact as a labor leader, someone who was standing up for his fellow players.

09:57

So the idea and the concept here is the alchemical gold and working with human nature to refine character. And this goes again with Coveleski, his fellow Shamokin born deadball era player and breaker boy — and the overcoming of this intense, immense hardship that they experienced in these coal mines as young children in the Appalachian in the early 1900s.

You see the creation of something like this and you almost wonder to yourself, what is this serving humanity other than a monstrosity, right, or a terror? And you look at the things that these young children had to undergo and endure in these mines for such protracted periods of time.

And many of them would never leave the mines. They are born and die in the mines, if they even survive to an old age. A lot of the history of the Appalachian in the United States is intergenerational mining; the suffering and turmoil and ailment that comes from such a tumultuous, dangerous and hard way of life. It's parents of parents of parents — all of whom are miners and they live and work in the mines for all of their lives. And you might be above ground for a couple hours a day when you go to sleep and then you go right back down into the mines with your crew the next day.

From what I've been able to discern and understand, the relationships that are formed in these mines are of profound teamwork and camaraderie and compassion. In terms of… you understand that because of the intense risk, I mean, everything from black lung to mine collapse — because of the intense risk that is endured in these situations, it is required that you form a deep bond of compassion and teamwork and create leadership structure in these situations because of how, not only how protracted the labor is, but how dangerous it is.

So the level of awareness and the level of teamwork that needs to be there to accomplish the task is immense, just to survive and make it out of the mines for the next day. And you can see, especially in terms of the foundation of modern American history, how... just how immediate the impact of this work in the mines was in terms of harvesting coal, because that's a direct translation. That coal… and without that coal, there is no energy — in terms of an excess of energy that's being harvested from the earth and burned off to create the steel undergirding of the industrial metropolises and cities of America and the technologies of America, which, in turn, allowed it to industrialize and become a world power.

Without this — really I'll just call it an essential human sacrifice on a collective level of hundreds of thousands of mine workers who are doing this work of going deep into the earth and harvesting this coal, which is then being fed to the belly of this massive machine, which is the industrial superpower of America… that's the war machine, that's the ships, that's the planes, that's the machine of the cities, which is the tenement architecture and the factories that are created along with their machinery, right? Without this, there is no modern America. There is no industrialized, world superpower America. It never becomes an empire. We’re talking about the foundational, ground level root labor and work which transformed world modernity.

13:02

We're really looking at, you trace the depth of modern American history… you find it with these 11 and 12 year old breaker boys in these coal mines in the early 1900s. They’re the hidden soul of modernity. And when you look at that, there's obviously a massive, massive ethical dilemma.

My real appreciation is baseball history because it allows for — through culture — to really see and perceive a human being and what they accomplish in themselves. Culture as an inroad and way of depth to a perception of the deep humanity, the essential humanity in and as the soul of the craft; the tradition. The art.

Because you can obviously, again, we talked about this — look in at the stats, but that's just… it's nothing. It’s the surface level numbers of a world tree of human history and soul craft and struggle and turmoil and ascension. The lives forged in the making of the perpetual, mutual craft of the sport of the diamond.

You're looking at these people who have dedicated themselves to the craft of baseball and refined their character through it. And the Lou Gehrig analogy that we gave before in terms of the spiritual discipline of the game is one thing. But Jake Daubert — in terms of, literally, the character that is so clearly manifested and asserted in the public sphere… and the relationship of that character to the experiences he underwent and the perspectives that he developed through the hardship of those experiences is far too much of a synchronized movement than it could possibly be a coincidence.

And of course, these things can't be known in history, right? We're speculating on the experiences that Jake Daubert had deep in these coal mines beyond the more generalized descriptions that he gave historically in terms of first-person autobiographical description, as well as the historical descriptions that have been provided of the lives of breaker boys, specifically in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal regions.

14:52

But what we're looking at is, again, something metaphysical and complex in terms of the alchemical gold of the human being. And the concept, right, which here is almost too apt and too literal — of the diamond being forged from the coal of the human being, because the human being really is just a composite of molecules and elements, right? A compound, an evolutionary device and a genetic technology in a genetic language that's been developed over millions of years.

You're looking at something that… if you were going to take an existential, philosophical lens — is a development of history and of nature that doesn't necessarily have any inherent meaning other than that evolutionary process of change as just a natural unfolding of the universe.

But then you take — through the lens of that experience — what is produced and what is cultivated. And that is just primarily going to be character. It's going to be disposition. It's going to be perspective. It's going to be through the pressure and change and force of history and the engagement with history and time. The individual naturally and necessarily changes. That is what we take with us through the transformation of realms and worlds and forms. A sea of changing forms. The character, the soul, the essence is a scaffolding of transformation as impressions are formed and stripped away. The Egyptian Book of the Dead discusses this in great detail.

And it's a question of whether or not we're authentically engaging those pressures and pivot points of change. Those moments of death, transformation, and descents into hell to encounter the diamond and the essence of the self and the soul; transmuting, transforming; metabolizing this process of suffering and ascension through revelation of the true self beneath the appearance of all things. The real root of being.

16:46

And Jake Daubert to me is really just a perfect place and perfect person to really look at this engagement with change and who and what was forged through it. I mean, this is a man who was born into perhaps some of the most difficult circumstances that can be conceived of in human history. You're essentially enslaved to the mines until further notice from birth.

This is a circumstance of birth. His father, I believe, was in the mines and so were his brothers. And one of his brothers actually died in the mines very early on. So he's in a situation where this is his past, present, and future, and it's a circumstance of birth. And through, much like Coveleski, the cultivation of his baseball skill — he attracts the attention of a semi-pro team and then eventually becomes professional; goes on to have a career where he wins an MVP award; multiple batting titles. He's known as the best defensive first baseman in the National League. Perennial .300 hitter. Team captain; leader.

Just numerous, numerous achievements in the realm of baseball on top of being — again, a labor leader, right? Someone who is organizing and supporting his fellow player in this game. Spearheading the movement to advance his fellow man.

That again, that rise through these circumstances of incredible difficulty, with Daubert — evinces or shows us the power of what is possible in such a circumstance or such a position — and who people can and do become through this crucible of hardship. Through this crucible of pressure and force of change, which many, just by circumstances of birth, are not ever put in the position of having to experience.

18:31

The power of witnessing that as a fellow human being is something that speaks. It says, we're starting to understand a little more what the essence of being human is and the essence of meaning and cultivating meaning is in being human.

18:50

So there's the concept of the alchemical gold or the great work. And this is the whole idea of turning, turning the body, so to speak, from lead into gold. And really what this is, is it's a purification or purgation through the cultivation of virtue and self mastery and self knowledge, self realization. A rising of the self through the alembic of the body. A remembrance of the eternal body and the spiritual form of the source through the ephemeral. It's a spiritual process through which the body is the, the alembic or the container.

The vessel to achieve higher and greater states of perfection and self-knowledge and discipline and truth. And this is something that I think is rarely visible in a historical sense, which again is why at the outset of this talk here I was bringing up Hercules and Perseus and Sisyphus — because these are all symbolic archetypal representations of this process, this process of the perfection of humanity or mankind; this striving towards virtue, this great art which in the Greek is termed ‘arete’. It's the striving towards virtue for virtue's sake and thus is a purification of the natural world or the material world. It is and sees virtue as the highest source of wisdom, power, and spiritual wealth. It is the higher art of spiritual transformation and purgation in the way, name, and vein of Christ.

You don't really see that historically.

20:11

A lot of what's visible historically is the striving toward material gain, right? It's the history of the conqueror, the history of the megalomaniac, so to speak, in terms of an obsession and infatuation with the surfaces; with the material world. The appearances. The images. The apparition of the shiny object that will fulfill the self from without. The object of power, control, beauty, desire. And the struggle to obtain it and thus incorporate it into the self or the soul as a sort of being-from-without. A perpetual vacuum or void. The desperate attempt. It's the shadows on the wall. It's not the actual spiritual fire itself. To allude to Plato a bit here.

What we're really working with is the fire, right? It's not the apparitions that we become enamored with and thus pursue endlessly and waste our lives in distraction. We're working with that real fire of spiritual transformation and purgation and purification and the gold that's rendered out of that lead or even that process itself. That process of transformation as the self, as meaning, as spiritual development. The real work of the soul as incarnation.

If you want to think of smithing — it's this process of using that lead as, or using that coal as an engine to transform and do metallurgy. This metalwork to make gold. This is a long history of alchemical attempt in literal practice throughout human history to render this in a literal term. But it is a spiritual force and process of development. It’s not metal or stones. It is heart and soul in unison and the metabolism of the human experience of incarnation to a transpersonal, cosmological holism; vision of the self that is all and eternal. And thus, a profound metaphysical ethics of unity.

This is a process that we’re seeing replicated; modernized — that we're seeing happen industrially. I think, realistically, is a subconscious revelation on a physical level; a redoubling of the Medieval esoteric impulse of alchemy in terms of literal work with chemicals and elements and compounds to forge literal gold — of the spiritual work that humanity is doing or that we need to do, which we've really lost sight of in the modern world.

That process of forging in a spiritual sense is the metabolism of experience, the metabolism of transformative events.

21:35

And you could call that trauma, you could call that change, you could call that force of nature. You could call that the spirit of history and time — but it's the metabolism of that. The incorporation of light and darkness. Of suffering and the depths of the bowels and history of earth. The whole, winding, genetic code of human experience and evolution and the struggle to survive over the ages in various different species and forms. The transformation of that; the metabolism of it into revelation.

And what Daubert experiences is a very extreme version of that kind of metabolism in an immediate, personal level and sense of experience — the metabolism of that reality of the mines as a breaker boy and the creation of the alchemical gold or the spiritual gold of the character through that process. It then emerges and is shown on a national if not global stage as a force of character and presence of truth, justice; strength and foundation in the archetypal stability of the deep self. It is a fount and found and root of being — upon which he stands. A man on the rock, so to speak. And thus he speaks and acts from that place of self knowledge; the knowledge of the place of the essence through his revelation of the root through his profound experience of transformation and suffering.

So this is a very kind of like esoteric and hidden and metaphysical device that's active in human history constantly. And it's something that is obscure in the sense that the fruits, the spiritual wealth that's rendered from it is not always immediate or visible or apparent, because it's something that's carried or worn like a garment in the soul. It's something that's carried or worn in the literal aperture and apparatus of the character itself. It's who we are and who we become.

It's not what we have and what we thus show off. It's something that's much more internal and thus essential.

22:37

So the experience of that process, it almost is too strange in the sense that — again, the literal metaphor of the coal mines and the industrial force of them; the descent and the coalition of Jake Daubert's experience… the coalition of his experience in these mines and the process through which the experience in the mines is metabolized; he cultivates this skill of baseball and the discipline of character and practice. And this skill inevitably leads him into an entirely different life.

But the ethic — the ethic itself, right? The ethic of his being that is forged in these mines, which is forged actually early on in his childhood, that ethic not only remains but grows stronger — especially in the engagement with a world which can't really conceptualize that. He famously has a dispute with the owner of the Brooklyn team, Charles Ebbets, who then trades him to the Cincinnati Reds.

And I think that dispute really boils down to a higher state and nature of character that Daubert has that Ebbets simply does not. Ebbets is in the business of making money and operating his baseball team like a business, which is all well and good. He’s very well off as an industrial magnate and, really, a titan of the age.

But it's a superficial form of engagement compared to where Daubert's coming from. He's coming from the mentality and ethos of a mine worker. From 11 years old, he had to participate and act at a profound level to assure not only his own survival, but the survival of his fellows. He's coming from the ethos of collaboration and teamwork and lifting up his fellow human being to accomplish an insurmountable task.

So the amount of spiritual strength and courage that's cultivated in the forge of Daubert's soul is something that's profoundly otherworldly in comparison to this kind of nitpicking and petty... microscopic business world of baseball. Because the way that Daubert sees and perceives the world is through really a spiritual ascent through hardship into the cultivation of a profound state of excellence, which he's actually holding within him as a state of being and thus is manifesting around him everywhere that he goes.

And that state of nature is incredibly profound and powerful, not only to embody, but to encounter — because it's a change agent.

25:16

Much of our world, again, especially the modern world, functions on superficial terms. It's entirely materialistic, self-obsessed, or solipsistic. It's just totally in relation to itself, and thus submerged in the ego.

But you have a figure like Daubert, whose relationship to life and collaboration and humanity is formed and sculpted in such a profound and brutal environment of, really — survival, and the necessity of collaboration and the necessity of really encountering oneself at the deepest, most essential level to accomplish a Herculean task. To find that place within oneself. To cultivate it. Persistently. Incessantly. That perspective is... it's like fulmigated in the course of his being.

And that's not something that's left behind, but rather it's something that's carried forward in a more profound, transformative form in nature progressively over time. Its a hypertrophy of the soul. A forging of the grit of the character of a man to profound, profound levels. And thus, the gift of profound strength and profound compassion. This is a man whose spiritual strength is so profound and so deep — it is a strength that is forged. And thus with it comes the cornucopia of real spiritual gifts of presence and empathy and kindness. A refusal to stand by in the exploitation and abuse of his fellow man. A sense of true spiritual leadership. He stands not only for himself, but for the others. This is his gift.

26:36

So again, this is not to say by any means that Daubert's work in the mines was a gift by nature — but in many ways, it was a profound spiritual gift that Daubert was able to transform that experience into a level of ethics and morality and consciousness which is very simply not seen. Very rarely seen. Because it is very rarely climbed and scaffolded as a spiritual ladder of consciousness which is the Herculean rising through the rungs of trials to perfect and sculpt the craft of man.

And it's not seen because the transformative measure is never broached, nonetheless met in most people's lives. So when we're talking about a spiritual poverty, that's really what we're talking about. We're talking not only about the lack — the spiritual poverty is not only the lack of the experience of struggle in a true foundational essential nature… whether that's struggling with your humanity, struggling with a circumstance. That essential struggle — which is… it's almost Job-like in its biblical nature — Jacob wrestling with the angel — that essential struggle with life itself and creation and meaning and the force required to achieve, live, become human, conscious… whatever it is.

The lack of that encounter, but furthermore, the failure to rise through it, the failure to metabolize that profound struggle and experience into the alchemical gold of the soul. That's the actual process of turning the lead into gold. You have to actually turn the coal into gold. That process is the transformative nature of the self-encounter. And so that failure, when we look at the macroscopic environment and view and perspective of modernity and modern life, what we're looking at is a mass failure of our spiritual education, right?

Because it's an infatuation with self, it's surface level images, it's the accumulation of wealth, all of these things that are just — it's purely in the material realm and thus they come into being and they die away and nothing is left because there was no essence within them, right? They were of material gratification for material gratification. They were shadows, glimmers, reflections of the essence of that which was within. Entranced by desires, we never enter into the cavern of our drive — which is the essential human nature. The prime mover. The force of the cosmos; the universe itself.

And this is the spiritual foundation that humanity has lost across all of our civilizations and cultures.

28:26

The Mayans, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Native Americans — all of these civilizational forms and tribes actually had a spiritual technology: which were the stories, which was the cultural artifact, the ledger that described — in metaphorical, metaphysical, archetypal terms — this experience. What it is to undergo the transformative event.

Whether that's Persephone in Greece, Inanna in Sumer, ancient Sumer. These are stories that.. and even Christ — when we talk about Christ going into the cave — these were stories that were the foundation, they were the undergirding of our collective consciousness as a culture or as a group.

And they are world stories — when you look at them structurally and infrastructurally, they are world stories — all of which are just telling us the story of humanity through a different cultural lens in terms of the real spiritual work that we're doing and that we're here to do.

And the loss of that foundation is catastrophic because you strip that spiritual ground of the real meaning of the self and the real meaning of life and the real work of life from the collective consciousness — and what you've entered into is really an entirely numbed, emptied and silenced world of just empty and meaningless pursuits… which, of course, that perspective is then reflected in the collective consciousness. This is T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Man’. And it’s no coincidence that text is written at the height of modernity as an emergent phenomenon.

It's a empty and meaningless endeavor to be human and to do anything related to being human. It's pointless effectively, other than to make money and achieve superficial things to gratify the emptiness that is modern life or modernity.

30:50

So you're looking at this critical point here, and I think this really gets us there — is that you're looking at this critical point where this is the onset of modernity. These coal mines are the onset of modernity in the most literal, practical, political, industrial way. This is the furnace of modernity. This is the energy that modernity is scaffolding itself off of in terms of its physical power and force. All of the machines that are being built are coming from this process of mining.

This literal moment in time, you're actually seeing a shift in the archetypal aperture of human history and civilization. Jake Daubert himself, the historical figure living this real life, becomes the literal embodiment of Hercules, really without even any fanfare.

It's almost like a hidden, obscure, esoteric realization of the spiritual story of humanity in the most literal way possible.

31:19

Through these coal mines; the literal ascent through the initial descent into the mines as a young child, deep, deep, deep into the earth — the ascent upward from that essential trap or cage or pit or prison… of whether you want to call that incarnation in a metaphysical way or just the literal circumstances of his life… the ascent through that brutal process into the spiritual gold, which he then carries with him into the rest of his life. Into baseball, into the way that he treats others; into the way that he conceives of equity, fairness, and justice, and actively advocates for them. For those in need; to stand up and speak and be a voice for righteous and fair and just treatment. To stand up in the face of greed and exploitation and demand better for his fellow mankind.

You're looking at the spiritual transformation of a soul through the profound event of the descent into — you could call it the descent into hell, realistically — because these circumstances are and were hell.

So when you look at that descent narrative, it's so fascinating because you're looking at this critical point in the creation of modernity, which is precisely when we lose this mythic structure which undergirds our understanding of the spiritual nature of humanity. This is what Nietzsche warns about in the late 1800s when he says, God is dead and we have killed him. He's warning us that our spiritual infrastructure, our collective consciousness, our culture narratives around spiritual transformation are dead and they're dying in the name of this new world of modernity, which is globalization under technology, under industrial technology, which is radically terraforming and changing our concept of the spiritual self.

All of our localized and regionalized spiritual myths, all of which were actually really the same — because they're just describing humanity and the spiritual process of transformation that comes with being human.

All of those local myths are being obliterated in the name of a homogenized, industrialized, hyperproductive society that's based around material and materialization. It's based around things, production and consumption of things, surfaces, production and consumption of images. Right? So we've put, we've entranced ourselves in the spell of modernity. It’s a force of being in a coalition of conviction. This is progress? And all the while our spiritual grounds and purpose; the transformation of the soul as the inward way and path of cultivation of the self have been left behind… into this entranced, outward movement and vision of changing the earth. We no longer seek to change ourselves in our spiritual transformation.

We've lost the real spiritual ground, but even as this process is happening, just as it's being initiated in a massive spiking level and way… you have this figure, Jake Daubert, who appears in this very quiet way, it's almost like a hidden way until it's revealed — until it's seen and recognized and understood — as an 11 year old kid in the coal mines in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. In a coal mining town, coal mining parents, coal mining siblings — who rises through this process — this profound spiritual alchemical transformation. He rises through this literal process, working in these mines as breaker boy and achieves…

34:22

Not just the things that he achieves in baseball. Sure, that's a part of it, but it's just a representation. It's the outward representation of the real work that's done in the soul, the real essence. He achieves this level of alchemical gold — which is so clear in the historical records of who Jake Dobbert is and was. He achieves it in a communally visible way; in a public national function. MVP. Labor leader.

It's so clear because he stands up. His character is standing up.

Not only for himself, but for others, right? In a massive and profound way, in a highly conscious way — where he's standing and he's having this conversation with Charles Ebbets and the owners and bureaucrats of baseball — and he's saying, I know what you're doing and I don't stand for this. I don't condone this exploitation of my fellow people here.

It's almost the rise into a prophetic role. I think of in this way, Moses is a similar archetype, a leadership at a group level — which is a leadership demanding justice and equity and fairness in the name of the real truth of what it is to be human. The righteous dignity of each person. Each individual. Each soul.

And to know what it is to be human is to know yourself. And to know yourself, you have to descend. You have to descend into that incarnation. You have to descend into the bowels of hell, the depths of the three-dimensional physical material body with all of the strangeness and unknown-ness of what it is to be human. You descend into incarnation. And you learn about yourself in the depths and the pit of that darkness and you rise up through it into the light of self knowledge; self awareness, self perception — and then and thus achieve a level of prophetic leadership. This is, historically… that's the Bible or that's Greek mythology or that's the Egyptian Book of the Dead, right? These are the guidebooks and they're the ways, right? The spiritual ways. Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso. They’re written by those who walk and have walked the way; thus show the way. Christ’s parables.

36:18

But as you see, so powerfully — at this crux of modernity, you have the historical appearance in just such a literal way, in such a hidden way… of a figure that is embodying and walking that path of the way. And he’s doing it with the humble protection and conscience of a man, a working man from the mines. He walks the path and walks it with the clarity and humbleness and consciousness of a man of the people. Grounded.

I just think it's fascinating that it happens right at this crucible of this moment of the death of the agrarian, tribal, fractured and fractal human cultures and societies.

All of which have their own narratives, right, and their own stories around creation and transformation and the human soul. But they abide the same internal architecture. The same movement. They’re fractal realizations of the same underlying spiritual principle at work and in effect.

That world is breaking down into a profound primordial unification under the industrial technology which becomes globalization throughout the 20th century. Right as that's happening, you have such a literal and clear and obvious representation of the metaphysical structure of all of these descent and ascent narratives in terms of the spiritual development of the soul; in terms of the alchemical gold of the human being and of the self — just being embodied in this man, Jake Daubert, who worked in the coal mines when he was 11 years old and experienced a radically transformed and transformative life through his discipline, his presence, and his awareness and his compassion for his fellow human being. It’s an embodiment, an incarnation of that mode and model, expressed in the literal radical, historical and documentary language of modernity in its very furnace and source; root of its power and energetic consciousness.

37:45

That's what I got here. Very powerful episode and I'll catch y'all in the next one.

Jack Quinn; The History of American Immigrant Labor and the Immigrant Experience at the Turn of the 20th Century

Aug 18, 2025

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00:01

So this is going to be more of a broader strokes essay. This is really going to hit on the history of immigration in America, specifically the early 20th century. And just kind of understanding the real wealth, the root of the wealth that is early 20th century American professional baseball.

We all understand very clearly the lines that were drawn — segregation and exclusion in that period. But I think there is a lot of redemptive history there, specifically in regards to immigrants. Immigrants specifically from Europe in the early 20th century who came to the United States with their families and became miners.

So you have the copper mines in upper Michigan. You have the mines in the Appalachian. And then you have the man who is depicted here, Jack Quinn, one of the last great spitballers who actually — he ended up playing well into his 50s. Who also was a miner, right? And we talked about Coveleski and Daubert and Ed Walsh and Lefty Grove.

01:30

It's something that's almost too strange and too common. He immigrated Jack Quinn from Hungary, arriving in 1884 as a young child. And they immigrated to Pennsylvania near Buck Mountain. And Quinn, actually, again, he spent time in the mines as a breaker boy and then transitioned to a laborer, and then moved from there into his baseball career.

The fertility of reckoning with baseball is understanding the eras of America's social, political, economic, and even spiritual existential development as a nation. And the wealth that baseball provides us in terms of understanding the history of humanity and the development of America, specifically through immigration, specifically through the very, very violent processes of slavery and economic exploitation… that created, really, the foundations of how this country was built, both in terms of the plantations and the industrial growth through factories and coal mining, industrial production — that created the circumstances that we live in today in terms of the infrastructure of modern America. And by and large, the modern world, right?

Industrialization was a global movement that ultimately formed the digital interconnection that we now experience. And America was a forerunner of this process.

03:26

I think you'd be very hard pressed to make an argument that any other nation had the amount of industrial firepower that America quickly scaled. And when you think about what it takes to create industrial firepower, it takes energy. And that energy is coming from the earth. It's coming from these coal mining operations, forging steel from coal.

03:49

So this labor power, this machine power, this earth power is coming from two different kind of sectors of the American economy. I'll say three because you have the Chinese laborers who built the railroads. You have the slaves from the transatlantic slave trade in the American South who are building the southern wealth in an agricultural sense using industrial methods.

And then in the Northeast, you have this large population of new immigrants — first, second generation immigrants who are working in the mines and who are working in the factories, living in the tenements in New York City, or they're living in these, these Pennsylvania or Appalachian towns doing the mining, right? Or they're living in Michigan doing the copper mining… all of which is necessary to construct these new age industrial machines — as well as cities like Pittsburgh, again — where they're working in the steel mills, working in these steel factories to produce the new metallurgies of modernity.

And so when you look at the history of baseball and you look at it at a deeper level and on a deeper plane, you're looking at the richness of humanity. You have everything. Carnies, to vaudeville actors, to this foundational substratum of the miners turned baseball players.

So Jack Quinn, you wouldn't… it was hard, it's almost like a Satchel Paige situation with Quinn, because it's very difficult to figure out when he was born and the early details of his life, because he immigrates very early from Slovakia and settles in some general area of Pennsylvania. But again, as we discussed with Paige and Cy Young, this period of time, of modern history — so much escapes narrativization, right? There's not the kind of surveillance level technology in terms of identity structure of self that existed back then.

Jack Quinn kind of exists in this, this lone, strange and solitary outpost of being… first generation immigrant to the United States of America with his family. He becomes a miner and conceivably he's going to be a miner for the rest of his life until he gets into baseball. Even his name was something that was up in the air. His legal documents were signed John Picus, but he said his real name was something different, but he didn't remember exactly what it was. His mother died when he was a few weeks old and there was a process of remarrying. Jack Quinn, in the ledger of humanity and civilization… he doesn’t exist. He’s a man without a name. A man without a face. A man without a history; an anonymous grave of a process of historical overturning which churned bodies into an economic machine for an age of industrial empires. He was a sacrifice to modernity — a child immigrant, a laboring body in the mines.

06:58

So you have this phenomenon of lack of knowledge that I think underpins — and we discussed this with the Dead Ball Era episodes — a lot of what's happening in this period of time in American history, precisely because history is not being written in a way that's centering this working class, mining class, immigrant class of humans.

And the way that I view American history and baseball history — this is the epicenter of what needs to be discussed because all of the innovation and energy and real power in terms of the creation of civilization and the American empire is coming directly from them.

The history remembers and recognizes the patriarchs and the industrialists like Henry Ford or the presidents, so to speak. These are the people that are written into the history books. But when I look at American history and I look at the real impact — and you look at these early modern American towns built around the coal mines or the copper mines — you're looking at some of the most profound history in terms of the architecture, the human experience; the intergenerational lineage of mining or the cultivation of community, closeness in community through participation in these working class events, these labor events — whether they're town halls or whether they're musical celebrations or cultural celebrations around a church or a certain denomination.

You're looking at the real richness in the full body of human history through that lens particularly. And you see baseball as being the epicenter of a lot of these practices. And baseball is actually one of the ways that these different ethnic groups of first and second generation immigrants who come to these coal mining towns to labor as miners come together and participate in a community event. It bonds them beyond ethnic difference, and even through it. Perhaps one of the ways is a superficial way of putting it. In many of these towns, it was the way. It was the cultural epicenter of integration, assimilation; in a deeper way than assimilation or integration, direct, embodied, immediate joy, participation, passion — and as such, a direct exchange and change of the human experience beyond all words, definitions, and names.

09:09

It's a recreational sport or an entertainment sport. And obviously as these miners come to the United States, they seek out their ethnic enclaves in order to be able to speak the old language as they're trying to assimilate into America and speak English. To retain at least some element of continuity of sense of self. And there's this whole process which is really profound and extreme and very difficult, not to mention the labor that they're actually doing in these mines, which is extremely, incredibly difficult.

They're gathering in these churches, right, which are, again, they're still ethnically segregated and there's this sense of ethnic difference. Baseball itself actually becomes the way of community integration — because again, baseball is not being segregated denominationally. It's a community sport that's happening locally.

So the anthracite region of coal, that Pennsylvania, Appalachian area, where they are doing this farming of the coal from the depths of the earth, there is so much difficulty in terms of integration, the conflict that's happening between ethnicities; the wages that they're being given, the working conditions, all of it is just this incredible, incredible difficulty. The class warfare and sabotage of unions. The struggle to survive under extremely oppressive, exploitative economic conditions. Having to use scrip at the company store. The lack of agency and movement; mobility of self.

Through this process, baseball emerges — I think, for a lot of these players — as a method to create a life in this new world, right? Not just economically, but culturally, socially, spiritually; even existentially. Because as I think we're all aware, the coal mining prospects are not very great. These working class, newly immigrated laborers are, they're either born in these mines and die in them, or they immigrate and begin working in these mines and die in them as an ethnic community which is attempting to establish its roots in a new world. Even in these mining towns — if one never left… baseball as a source of joy, participation, community; athletic freedom through movement and play. A foundation; a bedrock for real, authentic, deeply personal life in the midst of incredibly harsh and oppressive conditions.

This process of immigration changes a lot of things, right? Jack Quinn changes his name from John Picus. Many immigrants did, to seem more ‘Americanized’. To seem more possible and palatable to the public. But even then, right, what is his original name? Picus was a surname from remarriage in the United States. What’s his origin? Memory? His identity is changing. His language is changing. He's being acclimated to a very violent and difficult process and moment in time in American history, which is industrialization through mining power, the labor power in the mines.

So he's working — same as Coveleski or Daubert — working as a eleven, twelve year old breaker boy and laborer in these coal mines and in the coal sorting process, right? He ends up working as a laborer after he works as a breaker boy.

11:53

And this was no issue. Child labor was going to happen. There were no laws that were preventing this from occurring.

12:04

And so you have these young immigrant children who are trying to figure out what to do. They’re trying to find a way to live, to survive. To find meaning in a world where meaning has been rent, ripped from the root. Exiled. Lostlessness of self. Of soul. Of everything.

He ends up hopping on a freight train to the West to go to Montana sometime in the 1890s, according to history. And he has nothing. He's got ragged clothes, tattered cap, and his two fists, as he recounts himself. Later returns to Pennsylvania and throws a ball back to the field during a semi-pro game that he’s watching and then gets hired as a pitcher and then the rest is history.

These lifestyles in the early 1900s were almost mythically constructed out of necessity that formed a creative or even spiritual path for many of these people who became wanderers or vagabonds or even acts in the circus to sustain a lifestyle. Young immigrant wanderers uprooted from all possibility of self-making. Of world-making. Trying; attempting to find a way in this new world.

This is something again that was common in black baseball, the combination of circus acts and entertainment acts with baseball. A lot of the early barnstorming teams had to get incredibly creative — because what they really were was like a traveling act, in effect. That's what these... teams were, that's what baseball was, and in many ways is what baseball is still to this day.

13:58

So the craft that Quinn is cultivating, he ends up pitching through into his 50s. Again, much like Satchel Paige, these two figures have a lot in common. He is, he's creating himself from nothingness. His old identity from old Hungary has to be entirely left behind. How much of it is even remembered? He’s so young when his family immigrates. He changes his name. It's not even clear if he himself or there is memory of what his name originally was even beyond Picus because Picus was an inherited name from a process of remarrying that his father underwent. It's not even clear what that old identity is.

We're really getting to the meat of this here. It's that there's a historical erasure through this process of immigration. Many of these people who were fleeing utterly untenable circumstances — to come to the United States and work in the coal mines. And then history forgets, right? History forgets their names, their identities, their stories. Sometimes even their most intimate personal lineage and immediate personal circumstances is a forgetting; composed of a profound forgetting. A loss or a refusal. A leaving or an utter oblivion. Sometimes, perhaps both.

So a lot of this is about reclaiming and honoring those stories, the dignity in those stories. And it's difficult, as we talked about in the darkness of history episode, to reclaim that and see that. So much of time obscures. But the humanity is there and the essence is there — and that's so much of what history is and is about.

15:08

The loss of his name, the loss of his birth, the loss of a sense of rooted place or continuity of culture, continuity of inheritance. Even his mother dies when he's very young. The loss of all of this and the uprootedness, he gets on a freight train in the 1890s and heads all the way up to Montana with nothing. This is the existential condition of modern man in its totality. A total, or near total psychic, spiritual, and cultural uprooting of self. A thrustedness, or a thrownness, into the oblivion of a direct, existential confrontation with and of the real beneath all former mechanisms of identity, narrativization, storytelling, and self making. A direct encounter with the daemon of history — the eternal within the ephemeral. A direct encounter with the global human, or the spiritus mundi of the cosmos. Of the universe proper.

This is a man who's been so thoroughly uprooted from history and thrown into the machine of modernity as a nothing and as a zero. He's a zero factor in this equation of modernity as an immigrant who's thrust into this new American culture, which is really not a culture, it's a machine of economy. And in that process, baseball actually becomes this lifeline or this way or this path for him to build a life, a self.

16:05

A practice, a form of stability and a ground and a foundation in a world where otherwise ethnically, socially, culturally, he doesn't exist. The world in which he was born into and the world in which he is now living are in such a state of massive flux that his ethnic and cultural identity would be this kind of small immigrant church of Hungarians. Even the dissolution of the long-standing kingdom of Hungary is of this immediate and imminent time. He fled the end and the crumbling of the empire of his ancestry into the buzzsaw of modernity — stripped of all time, name, and former ritual identification of self.

A small, ethnic community and church group in a Pennsylvanian coal mining town and he would be living and working as a coal miner. But through this cultural integrative practice of baseball, which brings together all these different ethnicities in the town, as well as in the nation at large… America being an immigrant nation — whether that's from slavery, from labor, from indentured servitude… from people who are seeking asylum…

17:03

That's just the history of America. When you look at that, and baseball is a unifying force beneath that — it's almost what allows someone like Jack Quinn to exist. Because in all other senses and words, he doesn't exist. He's nameless, he's faceless, he's statusless, he's cultureless, he’s stateless — he's uprooted. And so you have this kind of new modern nomad, which is this mass influx of integration, or... integration and immigration in America in the early 1900s with these European immigrants from places where — they're not even speaking the same language, right?

And so there's this process that unfolds through which baseball becomes a way of cultural matriculation and a way of establishing a communal identity and rooting oneself in the new American world.

And I talked to you about my friend Cesar. He had very similar things to say about baseball being a way of grounding immigration from Cuba in the early and mid and late 1900s as a way of understanding and saying, this is something that translates to me. Even in the midst of total uprooting of culture and of self. Baseball translates across the divide. The athleticism; the practice of embodied movement and sharing in the craft and trade beyond linguistic barriers and belief systems. Particularly because, in the case of Cuban immigrants and immigration, the sport of baseball was so popular in Cuba already. The ground was fertile and laid through early modern Cuban baseball history as a way of creating cultural narrative and identity as a collective — in the midst of a national liberation movement and project, nonetheless. It was a critical part of that process of self making.

18:29

The sport of baseball is something that's a cultural memory that translates across these borders where not very little else remains the same in terms of the dislocation of immigration. So this really comes down to a sort of desperation of economy, which is extremely common to this early 1900s baseball scene, both in terms of black barnstorming, the Negro Leagues, and the European immigrants who come to America and work as coal miners and work as factory workers in these Northeastern towns, kind of Appalachian area towns — as well as cities like New York or Pittsburgh or Detroit.

You're seeing an ecosystem that's forming out of economic necessity, a labor necessity that's occurring in this rapid scaling industrialization of America as a civilization and an empire. You're seeing this flooding in of immigrant labor through which there is this process where those identities get intertwined with the development of baseball as a mass cultural phenomenon.

So then you have this great portion of American history and baseball history, which is so incredibly profound, that tells the tale of modern American history through immigration and through acculturation — through baseball as being one of the primary, if not the biggest way that immigrants found their footing in modern America and thus is such a big part of the popularity of baseball heading into the 30s, 40s and 50s and even onward.

Because you see, right, players like Jack Quinn, there's a level of profound resonance in terms of understanding their popularity — where they're coming from, who they are, who they represent.

It's seeing one of your own on that cultural stage in terms of just representation. Jack Quinn as a Hungarian first generation immigrant who was working in the Pennsylvania mines is standing on the mound in the World Series. And there's a resonance there, right? We discussed that a little bit with Lefty Grove… but there's a resonance there in terms of this emerging immigrant culture where there are so many like Jack Quinn. They lose their names, they lose their birthdays, they lose their identities, they lose their cultural sense of self and uprooting through this process of immigration through sheer necessity to work in the factories and the mines.

And you become a nameless, faceless laborer. There are no labor laws that are protecting you or your children. There are no... there's no real care by the companies that are employing these people.

21:26

If they die, they're replaced. The labor laws are very, very, very bad. And so you see a movement in terms of Eugene Debs and later with FDR in terms of reprioritizing and re-centering and rebalancing the American culture and civilization at large to prioritize, respect, and dignify the American laboring body. It’s a mass movement which changes the political grounds and balance of power in the United States.

But baseball does this innately and intuitively by people like Jack Quinn becoming cultural and even political forces by way of their very participation in baseball history because they create a re-centering of the American myth towards these people who otherwise are utterly erased, right? In terms of history being written by and for this sort of grand narrative of conquering and power and politics and economy… baseball is a subversive cultural layer and cultural history, not only just in terms of America, but globally, through its radical re-centering and re-prioritization of people, individuals who come from all of these different, very diverse backgrounds, and many of whom come from very poor working class backgrounds, such as Jack Quinn, first generation immigrant working in the coal mines.

And when... when these histories are remembered, much of the specific details I just gave you was through the SABR biography of Jack Quinn. His trip to Montana, the process of his immigration, his name, birthday; how he was discovered as a player and a pitcher. When these histories are remembered and cataloged and archived and institutionalized, what they do is they redeem from the depths of history what is lost.

Remembering Jack Quinn is not remembering everything and everyone, but it's remembering an entire group of people, right? It's remembering an entire aspect of American history, which was hidden and buried and left to the rubble of the past due to a perceived carelessness of inhumanity and decentralization of meaning and value of life which was carried on into the future — which is to say these people's humanity was the work that they did and the labor that they did, which is just patently not true. And that's not humanity. It's a dehumanization and a mechanization of the human being and the human impulse.

And what baseball does is it creates a window into that humanity through cultural participation, not only just in terms of who's on the mound, such as Jack Quinn, but the people who are in the stands, who are a reflection of Jack Quinn and Jack Quinn is reflecting them back to themselves in his very nature and self and essence.

24:11

This is the possibility of a much larger historical redemption through baseball and baseball history as an institutionalization, a process of institutionalizing memory, than really has ever been possible before historically, due to the fact that baseball acts as a springboard to access these past histories which otherwise would be — they would live and die ancestrally in these small towns and very few, if any, people would leave intergenerationally. Baseball history is a cultural history; a book of nations; worlds; profusions of human lives. It is a scripture of the depths of human meaning; the memory of the force of human lives as they wove and intertwined with the game as a world historical force of memory making upon the field, the diamond, the practice and rite of being. It’s the book of modern mankind; it allows for, prioritizes; documents — especially in the case of the SABR work; countless books by historians — it prioritizes the human from all walks of life; the efforts, labors, selves, souls; existential spirits and reasons and philosophies which cultivate and lay and toil the soil of the mutual craft of the building of the spiritual temple of baseball at which we all worship, share, rejoice in our humanity — writ large; at large.

A lot of these mining families are intergenerational and they continue to be so. The fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers are miners and they live and work and die and pass that ancestral lineage down in these small towns. We're talking about really recovering things that are otherwise esoteric and hidden in the American lineage and process of history — particularly in such a story as Jack Quinn's — because… you understand the conditions of mining, especially for these breaker boys and these child laborers in these mines. You understand as a first generation immigrant who can't even remember his last name, the birthday is up in the air, right? There's so many different things that are lost. So his sense of identity and his center of identity is lost. He has to create himself from the rubble of history, which is a series of movements which de-creates him and de-sacralizes him and kind of strips him down to the bone… and he has to find a way to realize himself in this process — and a lot of that for him comes through baseball. He does not leave the sport. He creates himself and constructs himself through the act of baseball.

You see the action that he takes — taking a freight train all the way up to Montana in the middle of the 1890s. This is a man who has been decentered and is rootless and is in this profound state of existential exile. This is a story that when it's told is a story that's being told for thousands and thousands, tens and even hundreds of thousands of people in terms of an immigrant body, an immigrant class of population that is so much of the early 1900s in America who become this labor for the industrial machine as miners and as factory workers. The trauma of being ripped from source, ripped from root, ripped from self. The dissociative process of fleeing, desperation, terror. And baseball as a healing, a balm, a return to the very root of being in the embodied form and the nature of practice; the spiritual adherence and sadhana of the game. It becomes a heartbeat in an abyssal world.

26:34

And then it being preserved, his story being preserved through baseball and nationalized through baseball — is a reification and a deification of that history. And when I say deification, I mean a prioritization — in that Jack Quinn and his story is meaningful. And as such, it preserves the fabric of the larger historical, social and cultural unfolding of this time. And in that preservation, allows us to remember.

So Jack Quinn in this way is an archetypal representative of this entire process that's occurring of mass immigration into these mines and into these factories in the Northeast and the Midwest. And the difficulty of that process of assimilation and how it functioned in these small towns, the ethnic churches, the extreme class warfare on behalf of these factory and mine owners who were extracting every single last drop that they could out of these laborers, and the process really of identity construction and reconstruction from the ash and rubble of this desperate process of immigration to try to create a better life in this new world.

It's a profound human process and a profound human moment and movement, and it's the real center and force of early American modernity.

27:59

But again — is not recognized due to a linear creation or a linear historiography which prioritizes power and economy and sacrifices really; dehumanizes and dematerializes the real spiritual human experience of undergoing this massive process and this massive turn of modernity which is globalization… as we discussed — through technology, through information, through transportation.

And really, first and foremost through immigration. Because there's a huge ethnic intertwining into the American bones in this early industrial modern period with people like Jack Quinn, who really are building themselves. And this process of self-creation with him, I think, is very, very profound.

He's creating himself not only as a human being, but as a pitcher.

28:56

And there's this series of events which are almost synchronistic which throw him into this this lifestyle and this way of being… which is thankfully — right, again — preserved by baseball historiography at large as a cultural heritage site which is sort of metaphysical or immaterial. Which has record. Newspaper, photography, baseball cards — all of these different ways in which we have discussed that record.

Which then allows, in terms of those interviews, the conversations, the talks that are published as part of baseball history, quote unquote… it's really just a way for and a way into American history and human history in a way that otherwise we would have a very hard time accessing in terms of those ancestral records. Memory. Baseball history makes human memory a public phenomenon in real time through the documentation and hyper-artifactual nature of how baseball as a culture was remembered in real time. This is primarily through the relics we recover in attics, buried in lockboxes… hidden in old pianos. Cards, photos, paper. Scrapbooks.

29:50

And you can see and hear and feel through his interviews who he was as a person.

‘Quinn himself attributed his surprising longevity to peace of mind. Nothing bothers me, he told a reporter. Why should it? The undertaker will take us all soon enough. There's no need to meet him more than halfway. A lot of pitchers worry themselves out of the game. They cut their span of successful work by whole seasons. What a foolish thing to do.

As much as I want to win, I'm not crazy about it. I realize the other fellow wants to win too. If I'm lucky enough to get the breaks, well and good. If he outlucks me, I may get my turn next time. Doing his best is no more than a pitcher is paid for. Bearing down in the pinches is what he's supposed to do. But that isn't worry and it isn't physical strain. I don't lie awake in the morning wondering what might have happened if I pitched a little inside instead of outside to a certain batter. Overdoing a thing is half doing it. There's only one right way to pitch a ballgame. Do your best and let it go at that. Fussing and stewing and fretting is like throwing grit into the machinery.’

You hear the ethos and the soul of who he is and who he was and how he constructed himself existentially as a person through baseball.

Again, the similarities between Quinn and Satchel Paige or even someone like Cy Young are profound because they impart bits of wisdom. They’ve created a sort of Heraclitean soul through the experience of the cultivation and mastery of the craft as a dedication, as a spiritual process of transfiguration of the self. The craft becomes the body in which they find truth.

Satchel Paige says, don't eat fried food. Cy Young says, a pitcher like a poet is born, made. Right, the little quotations which are philosophical. Satchel Paige, don't look back, something might be gaining on you. They prioritize rest, they prioritize a sense of easy perseverance, right? These people who sculpt themselves, I think specifically even through the act of pitching as a craft. The knowledge at the existential, philosophical level is born through the application of practice as a direct craft of learning of the meaning and function of life; the process of sustenance, sustaining, succeeding in relation to oneself.

31:45

You can see the self emerging through that way of self-expression and that way of being… that he loses, Jack Quinn loses his name, his birthday, his culture, his ground of his nation, where he, where his family is from, he loses everything. And he's thrown into the coal mines and rides, rides on a freight train halfway across America up into Montana, and then returns to Pennsylvania. And just by throwing a ball back to a semi-pro team becomes one of the longest lasting pitchers in the game of baseball. And a very, very good pitcher at that.

The construction of self is so powerful, especially when it comes from figures like Quinn or Satchel Paige, and I think especially Quinn here — because all of everything is lost. His identity, his name, his culture, everything. He's thrown into the mines. And maybe the one thing that remains is the ethnic enclave based around the church of Hungarians in this small town, Pennsylvania environment — which is all based around the economy of coal mining, anthracite coal.

32:54

He, in this process, from the utter depths of total loss of identity, total self-exile, total ancestral exile, everything that he is from, all of his blood, all of his lineage, is gone. And from that, he builds, actually creates himself philosophically into like a philosopher, into an existential philosopher, whose sense of self and way of life is perceived through the energetic movement of creation through the art of pitching, which is so much like what Satchel Paige does.

When you look at Satchel Page and you look at the history of black baseball, we're talking about something very similar in terms of the utter uprooting — cultural, social, political uprooting of the self, the loss of identity — which is stripped in the profoundly violent act of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and being brought to the United States and enslaved to do work on these plantations. Everything is lost, right? Even the concept of the master's name is at work here.

And so you're talking about an ancestral lineage through which the dynamic is the loss of everything. It's the loss of self, the loss of identity, the loss of roots and culture. And baseball provides a venue to step into in a deeply spiritual, even human historical, world historical global sense… to create the self through the practice and the sculpting of the art of pitching. Satchel Paige names all of his pitches different ways. Unique, creative ways. His method.

Jack Quinn adopts the spitball and he has a certain way that he throws it. A certain approach to batters and pitching. This is an art of the creation of self.

Baseball is a... it appears to be a surface — but what these people are doing is they're actually radically constructing the self and expressing the self. And through that construction and expression over time as a practice, forming a radical personal self-philosophy and identifying with life at the ground level. At the energetic root level of the expression of the physical body and the expression of the spirit of the individual through the physical body.

The loss of all of this culture and the civilization and the self, the identity, the name, all of the former historical and cultural roots that would ground you in a certain tradition and a way of being have been stripped in this modern existential rite of slavery and labor and being thrown into that tumult and that chaos and that loss.

35:17

What happens is, through baseball, there's a resurrection of the self — a resurrection of identity at a deeper level maybe than ever before because it's direct. It's explicitly intimately individual and it's the relationship between the ball and the pitcher, the mound and the pitcher, the art and the act of pitching, which is so solitary, so sculptural, so self integrated through the very movement of the art of pitching itself — that you create yourself from the absolute substratum of existence and that intimate relationship and art of the physical act, the gesture, the movement. This is so much like what painting is, or any other art form like music, but again… it's so much more physically, athletically embodied.

Each pitcher is different. They throw the ball differently. They have a different approach, a different philosophy, a different way of creating perspective on the batter or the game. And so that's a way in.

It's a way into self in a way that we don't really have words for culturally or socially because it's so intimately directly personal. So Jack Quinn's identity… it's his art. It's his act of pitching. He’s expressing who he is directly to himself; to you. He’s showing you that individuation is possible on a profoundly immediate and personal level, against all odds. The true creation and expression and outlet of and for the depths of self. The creative, art of individuality. Finding meaning in the abyss of history. The loss of everything.

And so when you see Jack Quinn or Satchel Paige pitching into their late fifties and sixties, you see someone who has sculpted and created themselves through the game, through the art and the act of pitching. And that itself becomes the identity. That itself becomes the way of being.

36:43

And so you live with that, you participate with that, you work with that, you become better over time. One of Quinn's best seasons happened, I believe, when he was 45 years old. He just continues to still himself and ground himself and still himself in this root of being, in this practice. And you see a deeper sense of self of a man emerge who's so deeply intertwined with this existential practice and process of baseball.

He's... so grounded in the root swell of that movement and his soul becomes so rich through that process because he's intertwined himself with this process of creation. He's intertwined himself with this practice in which he's developed his own identity, his own method, his own philosophy, and thus becomes a deep, deep, deep, deep, individuated self, truly individuated self from the depths of this alienation, this exile, this isolation, this chaos of loss, the loss of cultural ground, the loss of ancestral meaning…. the loss of history — and he gains himself in this nothingness, in this abyss of history, in this existential crisis.

It's so powerful. This is such a dynamic unfolding, so meaningful.

So that's what you really see here when you look at this man, you see what's possible. The profundity of this movement, the existential power and the spirit and the soul of what can be created in this venue of baseball and what was created in this venue of baseball.

38:12

You see the richness of the soul, the possibility of the human being beyond all previous concepts and direct relationship with the athletic movement, with the process of self-cultivation, with the strategy, with the attempt to discern direction, to day by day, game by game, pitch by pitch, strategize and revolutionize and reprioritize through that process of the game.

38:37

Jack Quinn creates himself where otherwise all creation was abandoned and lost to time and history. He becomes free, he becomes individual through the ashes and the loss of everything. He rises into a deeper sense and conception of self. Deeper than all else. Through what was rent he is forged.

38:52

It's incredibly profound. That's what I've got. I'll catch you on the next one.

The Unitive, Progressive Spiritual Evolution of Consciousness as, in, and Through the Shifting, Turning Aperture of the Becoming-Human

Sep 12, 2025

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00:01

So I want to talk about culture as phenomenology, as the appearance of the evolution or revolution of consciousness as it occurs cyclically.

Humanity and human beings are already a manifestation of this. We've gone over this in regards to the evolution of genes. The function and evolution of genes in human history, as well as species level evolution. Single celled organisms on this planet.

And we got, we went into the thermonuclear fusionary process of stars, which creates the elemental building blocks of life itself. Looking at an expanded mass deep time scale of the evolution of consciousness manifests phenomenologically in the appearance of things. In the appearance of forms.

00:57

So really… this is where it gets fascinating. Because culture is the aesthetic stage which human beings create that replicates this evolutionary consciousness process, which we experience or re-experience through the aperture of our arts, our sports, our aesthetic endeavors.

And our aesthetic endeavors themselves are ways of elevating ourselves toward this direct apperception of the teleological ends of consciousness itself, which is revelation.

01:27

So this picture here, right here, I think is really strong. It's Satchel Paige at the Braves training camp in 1969. And in the background, you can see Hank Aaron. So this is an intergenerational transfusion of black baseball history. Aaron played for the Indianapolis Clowns toward the tail end of the Negro Leagues. Satchel Paige himself could be considered one of the forefathers of the Negro Leagues in terms of his stature and his persistence in the game throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s. And even into the 60s when he continued to do barnstorming with black baseball teams as the Negro Leagues became more of a barnstorming institution and slowly disbanded.

So what you're looking at here is I think very profound because this maps, again… baseball maps directly onto the political teleology of American history, which is to say integration as one of the primary fabrics or evolutionary stories that America is telling itself, which is built into the very DNA of the establishment and creation of America in its constitution. That the essential paradoxes and ideological deceptions and real untruths that were built into the foundation of the American nation — which is to say, all men are created equal — when very clearly the people who wrote that document held slaves.

02:54

Slaves operated their households and their plantations and their lives. So from that place, you're looking at this need, right — the paradox that's built into the foundation of the political superstructure of the creation of America. This paradox itself is the dialectical thread, the narrative thread… which is America's confrontation with its shadow, which is to say its disjected body — which is to say blackness and black life in America.

And that process, all the way through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Jim Crow era, Reconstruction… works by W.E.B. Du Bois, I think in particular, are very powerful that mark that period. Moving into the 1940s, 50s and 60s, where baseball plays a huge role — with Jackie Robinson; the star power of someone like Satchel Paige, who regularly interfaces with some of the biggest black cultural figures in the country… musicians, Count Basie — all of these different people. The pop culture rise of black music with musicians such as Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday with her song, Strange Fruit… all the way up into this very critical moment of the civil rights movement, which we're looking at really right now here in 1969 with Hank Aaron and Paige.

And meanwhile, the most powerful — or one of the most powerful — intellectual and political movements in American history, the Black Panthers, are really, really, really gaining steam and power at this period of time with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale… and the revolutionary actions that this institution is performing, such as the free breakfast program — one of the most powerful political movements in American history.

This is going alongside this revolution in baseball as a cultural aperture. It's a way of perceiving the political movement of American history as a consciousness mechanism, as a consciousness metabolism through which the essential seeds and the paradoxes and contradictions of the establishment of the American empire… it's fundamental inequalities masked by a language which is, it's truth and justice and equality are words that can be thrown around in the abstract and mark so much of later Western philosophy, which is a discontinuation of the Platonic or the Socratic search for truth itself.

It claims these Western philosophical foundations, but corrupts them in that it institutes these abstractions, these disembodied jargon terms, philosophical jargon terms — which are abstractions from real embodied political truth, practiced political truth. This is, practically, the institution of dogma and the very real separation of church and state — which is to say, the separation of a conceptual, otherworld or other-realm of the pursuit of these theoretical niceties amidst de-civilizational barbarism and rampant corruption of state or statehood. The corrosion therein.

This separation of theory and practices is actually very typical of the failures of Western civilization to integrate its mechanisms and its instruments and its technologies, such as science or math or the information technology of the digital age itself, to integrate those technologies into truly a common welfare, which is so often stated in the core humanistic values of this modern American civilization, and yet it does not achieve a real humanism, right?

It's something that it says it strives towards, but in reality, it just lapses back into this old paradigmatic system and cycle of abuse and control and manipulation under the core individualistic tenets of survival, capital, and the rules and laws of an animal jungle of competition, status, hierarchy, and oppression.

06:55

So we're looking at cyclical patterns of the phenomena of consciousness, which — I do think, right — it is actually trying to scale itself into a real truth and justice. The intentions of man are become more whole. Because to become more whole is to become more existentially powerful. This is the real teleological through line of evolution as it pertains to the animal and the spirit. To evolve is to become whole and as such to be thoroughly ensconced in vision, practice, and embodiment in the true holism of the powers of the universe themselves, itself. But it's having trouble grounding that into the material foundations of existence itself.

There’s a severance — so clearly articulated in the common Descartes truism — ‘I think, therefore I am’ — which characterizes the modern Western philosophical issue of the resolution of the mind and the body and conceptual duality as a separation of psyche and cosmos; a visualization and conceptualization of man and God as separate entities… as is so clearly depicted and elucidated as a metaphysical situation of consciousness in Michelangelo’s Judgement conceptualization of Adam and God reaching out and touching fingertips. This is a philosophical and spiritual status of irresolution that is foundational to modern Western civilization; therein, the implicit and explicit separations of its constituent parts as an irresolution of consciousness — perhaps no more literalized than in the separation, accordingly, of church and state — which, as history well tells, are not separate at all whatsoever; intricately linked as apparatuses of power, control, and withholding and dissemination of knowledge constructs to shape civilizational discourse, dialogue; oppress and construct thought to fit narratives beneficial to the power systems and mechanisms of Western civilization proper.

And this reconciliation — the reconciliation truth and justice as embodied physical practices — I would say fundamentally describes the entirety of the history of America as a civilizational body and as an empire. It is the primary onus of the Constitutional mechanism of the United States, and yet its paradoxes and contradictions in the real body politic of America itself in practice are so abundantly clear.

07:13

So what's so powerful to me about this photo of Satchel Paige and Hank Aaron in 1969 in spring training is we're really looking at this crux moment in time… where Aaron is the rise of this next era of greatness in black baseball. And by now, American baseball has integrated. There's black players, there's Cuban players — there's a whole different way of conceptualizing baseball as a cultural aperture.

And again, I would say a sensory aperture — as in a visualization of the polis or the in-group or the body of America or American history proper. The body civil as a mass sense organ; with itself, a conceptualization of self and other. And what's so fascinating to me about baseball is that baseball's integration really does proceed, right? The teleological movement toward unity is abundantly clear and visible through the theatrical instrument of baseball as a visual consciousness and stage of inclusion.

It's a consciousness, psychological, visionary based integration through the cultural technology of America — before it actually occurs in a really meaningful way on the cultural, political, economic, and social stage. As in — a foundational political integration through policy and practice in the realm of the everyday.

And I would say that still really hasn't happened. What's so fascinating to me about culture in this sense and what's so important about history — is that if you were going to look at history, I think you have to look at cultural history first — because cultural history is the vanguard of political thought.

08:41

What I mean by that is that first we have the theatrical or the artistic or the aesthetic vision of unity, which is manifest upon the stage of mankind. And again, I'll gesture back to the Shakespeare quote, all the world is a stage and all the men and women are but actors, players.

We are having an aesthetic experience of life primarily, which is then being organized through the aperture of — as Kant would call it, judgement — which is really the sophisticated neurological architecture of the human being. That aesthetic experience is being organized through the aperture of the organism.

So there's an essential political conflict here. And I've discussed this in some of my other work, which is non-baseball related — is the issue of... selfishness and the survival mechanism and the fear of death as primary drivers of organismic existence.

So you have the organism which is living in this precarious status — of balance between life and death as a chemical reaction, which needs to sustain itself on a thermodynamic consumption and digestion of energy. Food, water, shelter. These are the things we talk about that are political and economic necessities.

09:57

So you have that environment and you basically have an organism that's seeking to evolve its consciousness, its aperture of perception up through this very, very base survivalism, a delicate survivalism — which is kill or be killed; reproduce and further the species unto death, effectively… which dictates and has dictated the vast majority of natural history itself. It’s a biological movement with clear biological imperatives genetically encoded into the chemical and elemental structure of the organism itself as it moves through space-time and attempts to produce and reproduce itself ad infinitum in a process of glacial evolution of consciousness vis-a-vis the techne of the human body itself. The body is the techne of revelation unto the nature of being and existence proper. It is the lens and the revelation… the being and the truth.

You have this organism which is at this crux point of having a revelation of some sort of deeper meaning or deeper conception of self… through the foundation and revelation of consciousness as the entire superstructure of being — the entire aperture through which the universe evolves and organisms and systems and chemical compounds and genetic diversity and complex biology and the synapses of the brain… evolve through this process, which is the innate intelligence and genius of nature as creative force, as a creative force of being.

So we're seeking, right, whether we know it or not, we're seeking to be reunified with that source in a way that is very profoundly direct and in this sense liberates us from this cage of survivalism and desperation and despair to endlessly consume and then die of consumption — which is typical of the existence of the organism. It's consume, reproduce, die.

And to live within that biological strata or timeline is to live without true knowledge of the profundity and depth and beauty of existence and to actually create that or bring that into life or bring that into being. It is to suffer unto death. As an instrument, or an unconscious thought of the universe in utero of its own self revelation.

11:51

So we talk about unity or truth or justice… or all of these highfalutin humanistic concepts. All that those dictate or are dictating towards is a sense of foundational unity in the cosmos, which would grant the organism permission to be reunified with this primary enlightenment which is a cosmological conception of being or self, which you would just equate to self-realization or revelation, right? Or any of these other terms like you might use in a psychological sense, self-transcendence.

As a way of conceptualizing a being itself which has moved into the transcendental stage of self-realization and identifying with that which it actually is, which is the pure creational and creative energy of the universe itself. And as such as participating intimately in a total aesthetic movement and motion of the creation of existence absolutely.

And so I talked about this with baseball and baseball being really a primary theater and theatrical performance of this aesthetic striving — and the beauty of baseball through non-contact sport, which involves focus and drive and dedicating focus and drive toward the accomplishment of aesthetic outcomes, such as hitting a home run or throwing a pitch, or creating a pitch — such as Satchel Paige does. He has many different pitches that he authors and artists himself into being.

He creates these pitches along with the foundational mythology of Satchel Paige, the baseball player, the human, and the history of his being. So he's a very, very highly realized person, if we want to go deeply into that. But this is not primarily about Satchel Paige. This is about the quest of all life to self-realization and self-transcendence, which is to be reunified with that creative force of existence itself.

13:17

So when you look at all of the different spheres in which that unfolds, you obviously have the personal or individual — where we talked about Satchel Paige as being one of these figures, this Odyssean figure of baseball history who himself alters its entire trajectory through his self-mastery and through his mastery of form.

But then you also have — which I think again is the reason why culture is so important as an aperture — you have the political, social and communal stage… through which this collective consciousness is undergoing a massive sort of awakening project towards this foundational self-realization or self-transcendence as a state of being or way of perceiving, or state of consciousness itself.

And so you can see... the essential kind of struggle or battle there between these two impulses. You have this survival mechanism, which is highly active — which is the animal body of the body politic proper — which is constantly asserting itself to survive. Violently, physically, sexually. And this survival impulse is being scaled through the civilizational architecture of being, which is to say, it's legislation, it's systems of power. It's mechanisms of economy, it's assertions of caste, dominance, class dominance, social dominance — as ways of establishing hierarchy where certain people are granted resources and others are not. This is a profound state of low consciousness individualistic, violent animality which is claiming itself to be sophisticated, just, or highly developed.

And this has a slight aspect to do with self-realization, but actually very little — because it's just basically saying the dominant group or parties have the materials to self-realize… but another group, the out group or the oppressed or slave class — on the other hand, are less — so you don't have those materials. It's a question of actually activating the resources, of food, water, shelter, information to self actualize and thus achieve a state or status of consciousness of revelation.

But those resources are not activated by those classes — the political classes who obtain them and who withhold them from the larger body politic. If they were, the entire political psychodynamics of these civilizations as functional systems or aqueducts of currency, information, and energy would radically shift. The terms and conditions upon and under which they operated prior — animality, control, violence, subjugation — would collapse under the weight of psychic revelation and realization of the self. The realization of consciousness through actual spiritual pursuit of the true nature of being.

This pursuit is not undertaken. This is the pursuit of philosophy. These political classes… they weaponize these resources out of fear. Control, dominion. So there's no self-realization being achieved, really, by either side. The out group has no access to the materials necessary to self actualize; the in group withholds them and lords them unto a cyclical, meaningless death of consumption and perennial dearth and absence of realized self.

That's a large portion of the course of history itself and world history… wherein self-realization is relegated to these kind of esoteric sects of mystics or of people who are deeply entrenched in different spiritual practices across different civilizational bodies, which is to say, maybe it's the priests or the magicians or the alchemists, right?

These people who are in pursuit — in so many different ways of saying — self-realization as a reunification with the larger cosmological body or the primordial unity of consciousness and creativity and perception itself. They see this as their task, their quest — which is an astute spiritual apperception of the real grounds and conditions of evolution and consciousness proper as a teleological unfolding of the universe itself through the organization and reorganization of energetic materials and formations as space-time itself. These are the grounds for revelation — of the essential nature of the spirit through the evolution of the form as a way of being’s comprehension of itself through complexity and techne.

16:03

There's many different ways that this pursuit has occurred or manifested phenomenologically in human communities throughout history. And so you have, again, right — you have the creation of religion… which is a way of simultaneously, historically… controlling this population through fear and through dogma — but also in many ways the creation of mechanisms through which ancient communities and tribes and cultures attempted to reunify themselves with the larger cosmological body; reunify themselves with aesthetic creation proper — and as such break free from the prism or the aperture of human consciousness, which is destined to this very tightly pulled and thinly spread teleology of birth, eat, reproduce, die.

Which is the animal life — and to reunify that animal life with the total cosmology and cosmological foundational unity of creation. As a quest of revelation; revealing the true nature of the self through various different practices. Meditation. Substances. Inquiry. Research. Practice. Experimentation.

It's a sort of subversion and return to the origin or the source of creation — beyond the biological language which one is born into. It's finding the deeper roots beneath that biological language and that chemical superstructure of the body or of the being which appears in form. What is deeper beyond that appearance or that perception of form beneath that form?

17:28

So I'm going to reunify this here with culture and the relationship between culture as a technology of visual aperture of being to history — as a unfolding which itself is a revelation of consciousness and a unification of consciousness through technology… and culture being that primary technology.

It's so profound to see this relationship in this photo here of Hank Aaron and Satchel Page, right? Hank Aaron being the next generation of legendary black baseball action who inevitably breaks Babe Ruth's home run record, the all time home run record, and receives these profound threats based on his race. He's a black man who broke the home run record that was created by a white man in the 1930s — Babe Ruth for the New York Yankees.

This was a very important historical record to the annals of baseball history, and as such, American culture at large. Babe Ruth is a name that's a pop culture name that's known effectively everywhere. And when he broke this, there was such a profound disturbance that was created in the cultural aperture and the lens of America itself. And when he broke it was so important, the mid 1970s.

And the importance of that is… it is so interconnected with the political and civil rights movements that are occurring for Black people in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, which are undergirded in large part due to and with Jackie Robinson's participation — which is… several decades later after he integrated baseball in 1948 or 1947.

18:56

This was a profound revolutionary movement that happened in culture. It was a cultural inclusion into the segregated white institution of baseball, which itself is and was America's pastime. It's a breaking of the bounds and entry into the gate of the political theater of America's consciousness and its subconscious.

Because there is Jackie Robinson — on the stage, disrupting this narrative of white inclusion and black exclusion, this integrative vision that is perceived upon the canvas of the political real, which is the American civilizational imagination of that which it is — being the spiritual legacy of striving and the aesthetic practice of baseball as a devotional rite of aesthetic drive to be reunified in a cosmological sense through the movement of being, through time, through space… to be reunified with this transcendental timeless whole of creation.

Through space time, the crack of the bat, the pitch of the ball — to participate in this aesthetic art of movement, communal participation… and the utilization of the physical technology of existence itself in time as movement — in terms of force, terms of mass, in terms of acceleration. In terms of these essential Newtonian physical principles which undergird the universe itself phenomenologically as the appearance and appearances of forms — to utilize those and to utilize the body and to utilize humanity as an aperture, a lens, a participation and a performance of organism and form — to rise in a higher transcendental awareness and consciousness of itself through the practice of the sport of baseball. An embodied awareness, a direct participation and primordial unity in ritual and in rite.

21:00

That disruption that occurs psychologically with the integration of Jackie Robinson… to me, and I discussed this in the Jackie Robinson episode — is the breaking of this deep, deep, deep time… I guess at that point it had been a little under 200 years of American historical unfolding — where this dialectical thread of all men are created equal; black people are enslaved or subjugated as second class citizens was woven and interweaved.

This narrative dialectical thread, right, which is again… the entire creation of the economic wealth of the South was built on the back of slavery. This thread that's being woven meets a critical… its like these lines which themselves are intersecting strands of DNA or themselves a ladder of waves or weaving threads which are coming together — sine waves for instance — which are coming together and crashing apart and building and separating… coming together and crashing apart. Which itself is, I would just say, an inherent metaphysical pattern of creation similar to the spiral motion of gravitational pull and relationship between planetary bodies as a discourse or communication of embodied forces as our solar system flings itself through the stars… a propelling of bodies through space-time gravitational relationship. A pull which keeps them in orbit. Bound to relational movement; as such regulates the structure and construction of the solar system itself. The body itself is an informational language of space time.

This movement… which is dialectical unity and dialectical opposition — this narrative historical, cultural thread comes together; crashes together — in a way that profoundly impacts and changes the foundation of American history itself… because America's primary cultural artifact, baseball, the color line has been broken. And as such, in its most predominant and visual and present institution of self-creation and self-realization… the cultural aperture of the in-group, out-group segregation has been shattered — and as such, the rest must fall.

As it continues to do. This process accelerates through the civil rights movement, through the election of Barack Obama. I'm not saying this is complete by any means. I am saying that the importance of baseball as a cultural aperture of the way that the American body politic visualizes itself is absolutely essential.

23:13

With this photo here, you're looking at this moment in political historical time, American history in the late 1960s, where the civil rights movement and black rights in America and black power in America is gaining steam. It's getting this incredible power, this incredible motion through political activity, grassroots organization; activists like Fred Hampton or Angela Davis — who are giving this incredibly profound voice to not only black history and black culture and black life, but existence itself.

These are some of the greatest political and cultural and existential thinkers that America produces. So we're looking at this moment of massive, massive, massive political change, which is intensely contributed to by Jackie Robinson. You have to understand how important baseball was and is in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and what it means for Jackie Robinson to break that color barrier in 1947, and what it means then in a historical sense in the following decades — for that to be this profound, if not opening remark… this powerful, powerful, powerful propulsionary reckoning and force of psychic revelation as a phenomenological decentering and re-centering of self (much like a Copernican revolution) in the political consciousness of America. The shattering of the cultural visionary theatrical projection of the American self… into political action and political movement and political revolution for the rights of black people themselves on a real practical level.

24:37

So you're watching this happen in real time in the late 60s. And meanwhile, Hank Aaron… in the background of this photo… who goes on to break the most important record in baseball history — which is the home run record set by Babe Ruth, is in spring training with Satchel Paige, whose career is already over at this point. He's going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame just years after this photo is taken.

And Satchel Paige is pitching in a Braves uniform. And I think at this point, he's 60-something years old. This is an intergenerational transfusion of information. And what's so powerful about the Satchel Paige photographic legacy is that the majority of his type one photos or type three photos — the photos that are taken by media institutions to announce, to project, to transmit information through different newspapers or media outlets — the vast majority of his material, including magazines… is created in the period between the mid 1940s and the 1960s.

And the reason for that is that these media institutions themselves are tied to American hegemony. Which is… is nothing to do with the Negro Leagues, right? In fact, it's an active opposition to the Negro Leagues and the legacy of black history and black baseball because of its segregational exclusionary mechanism.

The in-group of the American body politic is determined by and through its narrative aperture, its lens and its vision of consciousness itself. This is culture. This is media. This is the story of self that is being told and projected through the outlets, veins, and symbolic flues of the architecture of civilization itself as a way and form of the expression of itself. What it is and isn’t. Its narrative construction of identity.

But with the inclusion of Jackie Robinson or of Satchel Page into this institutional architecture… which itself is the power system of empire, where all of the money is, the economy is… the lens itself begins to increasingly turn on to Satchel Page. There's more photographs of him. There's more documents of him. There's more team and capital produced memorabilia or visions of him. The images of him rapidly increase after this period of integration and when Satchel Paige joins the Cleveland team in 1948.

26:58

So you're looking at, this is a domino effect that's occurring in consciousness itself as an aperture — if we were just going to zero in on American empire and hegemony, which is itself the vision of truth, quote unquote, through whatever civilization exists at that period of time in history. That movement is a domino effect.

It's… Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Satchel Paige immediately after joins the Cleveland team in 1948. You have these dominoes… dominoes fall, right? So there's more and more historically great black baseball players joining these teams in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And accordingly, the vision of black baseball and the black culture through baseball expands by way of the hegemonic cultural outlets and media production and consumption mechanisms native to the power structure of information and production and dissemination and codification of empire itself.

There's more media, there's more memorabilia, there's more imagery, there's more news headlines. So you're creating more more more visibility. And through that visibility, the literal aperture of who is included, why its included and what's included — which is as such the vision of humanity itself, right? Who is human? What is human? What is meaningful? What is good? What is valuable?

That aperture itself begins to shift as well. So you're seeing this domino effect, which is the progressive movement forward into integrative, inclusive, unified consciousness, but it happens first through culture.

28:17

It happens first through embodied physical culture — which is so powerful because the physical culture is the literal manifestation and embodiment of inclusion in these primary institutional civilizational archetypes, which is itself the theater of consciousness. And the theater of consciousness for America is baseball. So you have this domino effect occurring. And then as you move into the 1960s, it's natural.

It's natural that, okay, black people are becoming included into the cultural mechanism and the cultural institutions of America and American history. As such, we actually need to reckon with the fact that they're not being called human beings. They're being called second class citizens. They still have received no rights. And even after the Civil War ended, things have been awful, right? With Jim Crow era politics, black people have never, never been allowed to be a part of America in any meaningful way or received any… any meaningful status or stature in America.

So this is a trailblazing, pioneering overturning that's occurring in these two or three decades here. Let me pull it together.

29:31

That transformation of consciousness itself is the integrative mechanism. It's the springboard through which that movement… through baseball culture in an American civilizational historical sense — moves into media awareness, which is imagistic awareness… which is a vision of increased unity, right? The expansion of the body consciousness proper. And as such, the necessary revolutionary political mechanisms must follow in order to accommodate this very real rising in consciousness and awareness itself proper. So this is process.

It's a process of civilizational or cultural awareness of consciousness. A progressive expansion of the revelation of unity of interconnection of phenomena always already in relation; wholeness within and as their primordial superstructure — awareness and consciousness itself. This is the awakening of and between single celled organism, animal, and cosmic, primordial unity revelated psychologically through the perceptual apparatus of the appearance of the phenomenological universe visualized and experienced through the aperture of the body itself. It is a play of appearances. A phenomenological unfolding unto revelation.

As such, as images arise in the mind, or as awareness increases scientifically… or as certain creative or cultural landmarks — which themselves are undeniable visions of a deeper existential truth 00 arise in a civilizational or deep human historical consciousness sense, there must then be the accommodating expansion of the vision of self, which as such alters the literal physical terrain of these larger cultural social mechanisms and institutions, which must then accommodate this rising in consciousness and increase in vision. This is the course of human history.

So you look at genius, whether you were going to say Spinoza or you were going to say Einstein, or you were going to say Bach… you're going to look at genius as an individual force of this propelling of consciousness, this progression of consciousness through which… there are these certain moments where consciousness achieves hyperspace or hyperdrive, and there are these profound revolutionary or political or social movements which must accommodate the… let's say, the Enlightenment era philosophy or the Renaissance in Italy.

These are emergences of the creative power of human consciousness from individual figures or even movements of individual figures, such as the Russian intelligentsia before the Red Revolution in Russia in early 1900s.

31:35

You're looking at this here again through baseball — in this, I would say it's more of a progressive historical movement of the rising of consciousness — as baseball itself is this stage for this profound intersection of grassroots black baseball by necessity through exclusion in the institution of American baseball… intersecting with the exclusionary all-white infrastructure of segregated professional baseball in America… and this increase in knowledge and awareness through certain figures, like Satchel Page, for instance. He becomes a very, important figure because his visibility is so strong.

He'll go around barnstorming and just his skill, his ability, his showmanship, his bardic, griotic qualities draw these massive, massive, massive crowds. He works with Dizzy Dean, one of the most famous and renowned white ballplayers of his time.

Dizzy Dean and Paige become good friends and they play together; they stage these barnstorming events together. He's someone who himself is just moving this massive boulder of consciousness — and someone like Jackie Robinson — the two of them play together on the Kansas City Monarchs before Robinson signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Players like Josh Gibson, who reportedly hit something like 800 home runs in his career.

32:57

You have these figures, right, who are contributing… through their individual practice, through their talent, through their craft, through their mastery, through their genius — Satchel Paige's genius as a storyteller or inventing baseball pitches, or his showmanship — taking all the players off the field and striking out Josh Gibson.

These are all different ways in which these individual figures and forces themselves are creating this rise in awareness and consciousness at a collective, civilizational, cultural level, which inevitably collides into a reckoning in the American political consciousness — up through its subconsciousness, which is to say, its disjected parts or its historical darkness… or the things which it wishes not to confront, which is its legacy of slavery, its legacy of genocide.

These things that are actually the undergirding and foundation of American history, but are forced into a reckoning through culture. The unfulfilled promise between its vision of self and its political reality. Just like Copernicus, right, where the actual cosmological… the actual cosmological vision and superstructure of existence itself in his historical time needs to be radically altered to accommodate truth. He himself as a figure of revelation revolutionizes the literal cosmology of existence. And you can see the deep psychological unconscious backlash to the revelation of the real political, existential reality. The false ground falling out from beneath the politically conceptualized social, civilizational, and existential self. Galileo, again, is another good example.

You have these moments, you have these movements. Individual, collective, cultural. Often and sometimes intertwined.

34:23

And I think — especially through baseball and black baseball itself — these figures like Paige or Gibson or Jackie Robinson… these figures who are acting as these massive, almost like jet engines or propulsive engines of consciousness through which the entire vehicular unity of black baseball and black culture through baseball is being propelled into this radical political awakening, which is the progressive quality of real unity and real integration in practice.

And this is what's so important to me about baseball culture, because baseball culture is an embodied physical practice. It's a political reality, which is occurring in the physical body on an embodied field through the embodied stadium in which there is a political communal gathering. It's very different than Spinoza working, or it's very different than Einstein working. These are individual solitary figures whose genius may be a part of maybe an academic community or an intellectual or an artistic community.

But it's relegated to there as such. And they're creating these revolutions of consciousness, which are inevitably absorbed by the body politic at large, but not in a really integrated, unified way in terms of the democratic ground of history. They’re intellectual unfoldings which slowly shift the collective aperture of the perception of the real through slow filtration of these profound and complex ideas into the civilizational architecture of culture itself. They must move downward into comprehension. The sheer force and mass of these conceptual realities is profound, complex, massive. Towering revelations that emerge from the individual minds of giants.

Baseball itself is probably the most profound democratic ground of American history in that it is entirely non-denominational in terms of intelligence or wealth… it's something that's being witnessed as the literal cultural aperture of America itself. It is a ground of demos. Collective, communal participation and revelation. Collective witnessing. The film screen of the civilizational vision of being, striving. Political seeing as phenomenological theatre of consciousness.

36:13

As it proves historically — baseball is beyond and through the bounds of class, beyond and through the bounds of race… progressively, right, it takes time. It is an integral force of existential consciousness vis-a-vis the uniquely modern American civilizational and cultural dilemmas of irresolution of conception of self.

In and through time and the proving ground of history — baseball itself is this profound integrative force in American history — which is a function primary in the political underground as a rising force of consciousness first through the aperture of culture and participation and embodiment and the movement of athletic… and the physical force of athletic to actually propel American history into newer, more radical forms of political consciousness — which in itself is the entire project of the universal whole of consciousness and existence itself — localized in space-time to the American civilizational, empirical project of self and self conception.

So when you're looking at this photo, you're looking at this profound moment of change that's occurring in the American political history — its aperture and its lens of inclusion, the civil rights movement. And you're watching one of the most important figures in black baseball history, Satchel Paige, in the foreground — while Hank Aaron watches on — just years from breaking the all-time home run record, which is itself a foundational importance or measure of greatness within baseball itself as a cultural communal architecture… a way of perceiving being, celebrating being, and participating in the cosmological unfolding of the universe itself through aesthetic play; through creative aesthetic play.

That's what's so profound about this. This document here is really a document of this moment in time, which is the crux point… which is actually a little bit past, right? If you think about Satchel Paige in 1948, Jackie in 1947, it's already past the revolution that baseball created and the shock wave or the foundational rumbling in the architecture of the American political consciousness proper. The rising into that visibility, which then increases over the end of the forties into the fifties and the sixties.

But this moment itself in 1968, 1969 — is the political crux of the larger integrative and integral movement, which is profoundly necessary; which becomes politically possible after the cultural aperture expands through that boundary breaking vision on the theatrical stage of being… in which the the narratology of the culture of the civilization itself is disrupted by the radical emergence — as in standing on the stage of baseball history with Jackie Robinson — of the disjected; of the politically repressed, culturally suppressed, consciousness oppressed quality of its wish to forget, which is an intergenerational historic phenomenon of trauma… which resides beneath the foundational cultural architecture itself.

39:07

So each… you might say, intergenerational trauma — as an individual, right? Those are things that you experience through your genes. Those are things you experience through the culture of your ancestry, the things you're taught and you're told and you believe you believe. Maybe your religious systems, maybe your vision of self, right? These are all things that are… it's like a historical architecture or a sedimentary rubble of history, which is inherited — through which you must work back and achieve the original self.

And that's exactly what we're talking about in a larger cosmological space-time sense — of achieving the original self of creative being as the foundation of the universe. We're working through and back through the architecture of the body, the biology, the chemistry, the elements — all of the figures and forms which create this physical body and returning to that original creative source through and into aesthetic play as a profound awakening, as a revelation of being itself.

As such, civilizationally, it's the same thing, right? This is a scalar, fractal phenomenon. We're working back through the civilizational architecture to reveal the foundations… in which there is usually always, really… always a paradox in a world historical civilizational sense — of the ideological or philosophical architecture, which creates the foundations of the the narratology of the culture of the civilization — and the inherent, imbued contradictions within it… which are always that which it is working through; working itself through as a narrative arc or a cultural teleology of being itself… and inevitably collapses into the revelation of that which it forgot or disjected. The self image is a projection with which there is always a shadow of the disjected part. Of self and of other. Of self and of world. Unto awakening as the perennial inclusion of the radical totality and whole of being itself as an unbroken whole.

This is the psychic hypertrophy of awakening manifest through the aperture of each organism as a rising and falling of the cognitive architecture of the universe itself; each civilization, culture, idea, and presence or phenomenological apparition of being unto the architecture and architectonic revelation of the whole of being and totality itself. Awakening of and as to the true nature of the cosmological, energetic itself absolutely — which is being actively remembered through the process of space-time itself… through the process of awakening by way of perception of phenomenological bodies and beings as perceived separate entities unto the revelation of the hidden architecture and force of all of creation. This… which is a perennial unfolding and a progression of consciousness, through revelation. Through space, through time; through the appearance of forms and the development of the technological constructs of organisms, of beings, of bodies.

Revelation occurs technologically. It occurs through the body, through experience, through the senses. It occurs technologically — through culture, through the stories we tell, through the theaters, through the myths, through the athletics and the arts that we create… because all of consciousness and all of existence is always already arising through the experience of the psyche in space time. We're always revealing ourselves to ourselves. This is an inherent process — but becoming aware of that process reveals the giant subconscious architecture of existence itself and the real priority of existence itself, which is realizing itself through the human… which is realizing itself through human culture… which is realizing itself through cosmology or the cosmos.

Which is realizing itself through the awakening of the universe in a bird or a plant. This is all the same thing. We're talking about the same architecture, just at different scales.

41:49

So this is a very, very profound moment of awakening that is being depicted here in the American political subconscious. And baseball itself becomes the billboard or the banner, which shows us…

It's a way of entering into that understanding. Just the same as the myths of Sisyphus or Inanna or Hercules, right? All of these different myths historically were ways of entering into this awareness of the larger phenomenon of consciousness revolution, evolution and awakening… through the human being, through the aperture of the creation of the human being. The brain, the nervous system, the eyes, the ears, right? These are all different ways of sense perception.

42:18

And in sense perception, we're experiencing this slowly reconciling whole… through the fragmentary aperture and order of the human being as a sensate biome of seemingly independent touch and life and survival… and this awakening — up through the organism into the revelation of the total cosmological whole of being itself, that which we irrevocably and inevitably are.

And our cultures are enacting this… and our cultural technologies are enacting this and realizing this. And as such, all of our political movements are are necessarily just a narratology towards it, towards that awareness or that awakening.

And then as such, there's a radical birth of something new, which is self-realization or self-realized societies or cultures, which themselves are actively participating with that awareness of consciousness, with that awareness of the aesthetic teleology of being and that return to the creative… which is the formation of the universe itself. And through all things, consciousness is rising in this profound architectural design of nature — which is the creation of the synaptic architecture of the brain. I was saying in another post, the brain… it's like the Sistine Chapel of nature. This profound, intricate architecture that's being created and constructed through hundreds of thousands and millions of years of nature's progressive weaving of consciousness — in terms of a way of perceiving.

An aperture which gives us insight, revelation into the foundations of nature. Our science. Our philosophy. Our inquiry into truth; existence; reality.

44:11

And so this is already all playing out unconsciously. This is already a movement that's happening and continues to happen. But our becoming aware of it actually allows us to unify at all scales and say… the single-celled organism in this progressive interweaving of nature's experimental qualities in the primordial depths of oceans, and this evolutionary process through which human beings were formed and the forebrain was formed and our cognitive faculties and our philosophy as an ability was formed… through that, we have these cultural theaters which unconsciously, really… were playing out this process in terms of awareness of real integral inclusion. And this goes back to the foundations of the American civilization itself and its constitution.

This was built into American civilizational history — this contradiction that was written into its primary laws and primary conceptual architecture of being and self at a collective level — that actually necessitated in its very creation this radical reckoning. The same can be said for the architecture of the human being — the radical genetic awakening we are having as and by the nature of existence and creation through our architecture… into a radical incorporation of ourselves into, through, and as all of existence proper. We are the eyes which peer into the reality and nature of existence and being itself; through our revelation become intimately unified with the whole of creation. We are those same eyes of the substrates of consciousness in which primordial fish; these organisms of cell chains formed in ancient pools — unto this same, great evolutionary development of the shifting aperture of nature itself.

This is a cosmic profundity… with the awakening of the ways and the facts that it did not or has not already achieved — that integral unity which it strove towards. Civilizationally, culturally, organismically, existentially.

So you have each individual being striving toward that integral awakening — just as much as you have each individual culture and civilization, which brings them all together. As da Vinci said, look closely at everything. Everything is connected to everything else. Everything is unified. It's just a question of seeing that.

And this again is what all of our sciences strive towards, all of our philosophies — all of our attempts to understand and penetrate history as a seeming chaos of events. Even sex and sexuality is the creation and production of a profound unity in practice through the interpenetration of organisms and the seeding of a new unity as in a form of consciousness which combines hitherto separate genetic architectures into one organismic body; form.

It's not chaotic, it's not… but it's just seeing it at that metaphysical, superstructural level — what's actually actively unfolding at a primary, primordial, universal sense; through all of the different architectures of the universe — which is to say different forms of being, different creations in space-time… which is the setting of the stage of life unfolding.

Through those different apertures or scales or synaptic lenses of consciousness, this primary primordial unity is already being created and unfolding, even down to the level of human culture.

So that's what I got. I'll catch you all on the next one.

Hank Greenberg, 1936; The Transformation of the Self-Image of Consciousness in Space & Time

Sep 16, 2025

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Sharpen yourself and your instrument of perception of the truth within. Reveal the ancient truths we know innately through yourself and reveal them to the world.

Enlighten us all and change the world through your participation in this world through the unique aperture of your individual genius. Find what you are here to say and say it. Give the gift that changes the way we see the world and ourselves forever.

INTRODUCTION

00:00

This is the key. This is absolutely the key. Consciousness shifts, at least on a social political level… in terms of the way that masses think, whether it’s civilizations or nations or regions or locales. Consciousness shifts because of a rising in awareness due to cultural images, cultural artifacts, cultural materials.

So in a period of time like this in human history (2025), the best possible thing you can do is create radical forms of representation that expand people’s perception of reality and expose people to that. Fox News is such a great example of how this occurs in America. It's a closing of the cultural aperture of a specific group of people through dogma, through the ritual creation of materials that propagate a certain point of view and exclude and narrativize the dehumanization of others.

00:55

That’s the best possible thing to do in situations like this culturally and historically — when the aperture narrows significantly and contracts, and there's a very, very intense regression or retroaction into very conservative regressive politics of violence or hatred or exclusion… is to create radical cultural artifacts of inclusion, right? And to make those readily accessible available to be seen.

To create larger perceptions of humanity and greater perceptions of inclusion and cosmological unity and force, right? Because the progressive instinct and impulse is historically, genius. It's da Vinci, it's Einstein, it's van Gogh, it's Mandela. It's these different figures that we have historically. It's Angela Davis, Fred Hampton… who opened up our perception of reality, who opened up the possibility for more. Just as much as we have of regressive, constrictive, conservative thought, which attempts to draw consciousness back into a regressive past where minorities or ethnic groups or women are excluded or punished for existing, right?

This is the contradiction that we live in… and culture is the aperture through which consciousness expands and significant change happens. And a lot of that ends up becoming solidified for extended periods of time, if not permanently, which is very powerful.

HANK GREENBERG, 1936:

00:00

So I wanted to tell this here, we're gonna go deep. We might even be going even deeper than we have before. This is a photograph from the Detroit Times, which was then assimilated into the Sporting News Archival Collection — of Hank Greenberg receiving the Sporting News Most Valuable Player Award in 1936 on August 13th… I think just three days before the Olympics would conclude in Germany. So that's the Olympics of Jesse Owens fame, right?

And so what I want to talk about here is a really, really crucial aspect. And we touched on this in the previous essay on Hank Greenberg. It's the idea of culture as the aperture through which consciousness shifts.

00:58

And we went into this with Satchel Paige as well. But the moment with Hank Greenberg here is so profound explicitly because it is a public, national, and even global presentation of a rising in consciousness through a figure who — on the public stage is receiving recognition as a humanization… which is counter to the rising, this rising, fomenting, regressive, deeply conservative, retroactive consciousness of fascism, right? And specifically the scapegoating of Jewish people as criminal or evil or corrupt or inhuman or inhumane.

This is something that even in Detroit at that period of time — which was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the United States, as we discussed with Henry Ford's brochures and documents about Jewish people at the time… you have this political consciousness, which is very constricting and contractive and is bearing down on this specific ethnic group, not only nationally in terms of the United States, but globally, locused in Germany — describing these horrific attributes and characters about Jewish people. And I'll allude again to these various different fascistic or conservative phases of the unfolding or development of the human consciousness, which are based in oppression, subjugation, and domination as political constructs of power.

Power making, power creation, and power exertion through dominion and punishment of politically constructed social out-groups, whether that's a certain minority or an ethnic group or women. Whoever that is historically that's being targeted by that civilizational group at large as the bogeyman… for whether it's their political, social, cultural, or even psychological ills as a population at large.

03:23

So you have this phenomena of this constricting of the aperture of the collective consciousness and the focusing on a certain group, which in the mid 1930s in a very contracted, immediate way was this Jewish ethnicity. And this was being targeted in a way that the entire cultural narrative that was being spun through the existing media outlets was incredibly anti-Jew. Anti-Jewish people, anti-Jewish culture. Again, Henry Ford in the United States; many prominent political and economic and cultural figures in the United States were participating ah profoundly in this anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic sentiment — as well as obviously in Germany and throughout Europe.

So you have this right, it's actually, not even a national consciousness… it's a world consciousness — that is rapidly constricting and contracting around this ethnic group as the scapegoat of the Jewish people. And you can see in this particular moment, which is what's so profound about the story of Hank Greenberg, is that Hank Greenberg himself as a figure stands really alone in this moment in time in human history in terms of a Jewish cultural figure who emerges so prominently, not only on the national stage in America, but actually globally in terms of Jewish cultural communal groups that hear about him and adopt him as a legendary and heroic figure of the entire Jewish ethnic group and subculture — regardless of whether or not they're baseball fans.

Because what he does and is doing is he's performing this heroic spiritual act on the global world stage amidst one of the most violent genocides in human history. And he's standing on this stage — this one man who's effectively standing alone as a mass cultural force — as a political and spiritual counterbalance to this massive global movement of Jewish ethnic punishment and scapegoating.

05:20

And this photograph itself… and this is why I've gone into media as being such a profound form and aperture for this kind of cultural revolution as a spiritual revolution of perception and consciousness — is photography as image making, humanization, and witnessing — in terms of an imagistic representation which stands in the face of the existing narrativization of dehumanization or narrativization of in-group and out-group exclusion.

We went into this with Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson stepping onto the stage of American professional baseball as the cultural aperture for the American political subconscious — through which it digests and subsumes its narrative mythologies and its heroisms and its spiritual strivings and its conflicts. This, again, primarily through image making, iconography, and witnessing as in and through embodied event, sense perception, the faculty of judgement, and sight through its media outlets and veins of dissemination of information and imagery of said striving and sporting.

Culture is the place of the metabolism of the collective unconscious, through images. This is, again, historically, the function of myth as a creative image making device which mirrors the hypertrophic steps of the psyche or consciousness itself of the individual or the ancestry or the collective as it begins to move from the fragmentation of animal consciousness, trauma, and ahistory into a full spectrum awareness of existence itself and deep time as process of evolution, revolution; the movement of consciousness toward wholeness. These myths and metaphors themselves are representations; representative forces of this literal psychic process or psychic force occurring in human history and in consciousness at large — imagistic, visual representations of the psychic process of integration unfolding as in nature, history, existence, world.

06:45

When you have a photographic image of Hank Greenberg in his Detroit Tigers uniform, accepting the Sporting News Most Valuable Player Award in 1936 amidst the incredibly violent, rapidly spreading anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic sentiment… this vitriol is being fueled by Hitler's Nazi Germany, which the year prior had instituted the Nuremberg Laws, and was attempting to whitewash its political conscience during these Olympics that were occurring just across the Atlantic Ocean

You have this figure, Hank Greenberg — here is being recognized as undisputably the greatest or one of the greatest… but he's being recognized here as the greatest baseball player in 1926. And he is recognized throughout the tail end of the 1930s as one of the greatest baseball players to set foot on America's most important stage during the golden age of baseball; arguably ever.

Remember — the absolute and utter precedence of baseball in terms of America's conscience and consciousness, how it processes and metabolizes and digests its perception of itself. Baseball is America’s cultural mirror for imaginal and imagistic self making. It is the media outlet of the imagistic reflection of the American self. The mirror shield through which Perseus gazes to perceive Medusa. Baseball, again, is America's theater. And the newspaper is America's informative media outlet.

And the primacy of photojournalism in this moment… of the heroic rise of baseball in the golden age of its visibility in America. It makes America’s soul and psyche process profoundly visible. It makes this process of the hypertrophy of the American political consciousness — as it occurs almost unconsciously, away from the bright lights of direct political legislation — essentially accessible to the veins and aqueducts of the body politic proper. The intersections of the historical moment of this photo along with the historical technology of this photo as a peak relic of archival photojournalism are extremely powerful.

This is an incredibly profound moment as it is captured on the field with incredible detail and clarity. Let me see what else I need to get to here.

Give me one second.

08:16

So when you have a moment like this, this photograph is taken. It becomes a institutionalized public image. This was used in the Detroit News to announce Hank Greenberg's incredible achievement — projected not only locally, but nationally. And again, this was adopted into the Sporting News’ Archival Collection proper, presumably because the award he was receiving here was from the Sporting News, probably the most important cultural document for athletics in America at the time.

You have this moment, which is being archived in the collective consciousness as a visible public media image of Hank Greenberg, this Jewish man who is standing in the face of this incredible scrutiny and pressure and scapegoating of an entire ethnic group globally in a very contracted, acute phase of the rise of global fascism and the rise of the global scapegoating and oppression of the Jewish people on an international stage. And this is a moment of incredible political change, which is occurring by way of and through this counter pressure or this counter organization of culture and the aperture of culture, which is Hank Greenberg participating in baseball; having one of the greatest baseball seasons of his generation and receiving the Sporting News Most Valuable Player Award.

10:13

We're talking about culture as a sort of battleground of perception and a battleground of consciousness — where you have two forces which are essentially jockeying for position. And I described this in a separate post where I was discussing this with someone else in a slightly unrelated topic, but you have the progressive impulse, which is the impulse of genius, whether that's the impulse of a cultural movement such as Nelson Mandela and the ending of apartheid in South Africa or you have da Vinci or Einstein or Goethe or Copernicus — who are these figures, these individual figures who are advancing the human spiritual consciousness leaps and bounds into the future by way of their independent academic or intellectual or creative realizations which reveal an entirely new realm or paradigm of possibility in the human consciousness itself proper.

You have that — which I would say is not so much the realm or domain of baseball or the realm or domain of culture as a collective, democratic pursuit as it is genius as a form of individual achievement which shatters the known bounds of the possible and the real. But if you were going to talk about progressive cultural revolution, you're talking about representation through images which expands the aperture of the collective consciousness itself in terms of what is included; why it's included. Again, progressive is and stands in for the expansion of consciousness into deeper inclusivity. This is the basic spiritual, metaphysical principle of the evolution of consciousness as hypertrophy of the psyche which is manifest evolutionarily in the increasing sophistication and complexity of the development of the brain and the nervous systems and organismic apertures of organisms; in the individual and collective process of metabolizing increasing depth of realization and revelation of the truth of history; existence — awakening through the light of our sciences, maths; apertures and lenses of perception and insight into the previously dark glass of history, time, reality, being. We are peering back and down into our evolutionary past and the conditions of our present to understand who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.

11:13

Who is human? What is human? What is important? What is good? What is valuable? And so in those cultural images, in a lot of ways, that's where genius intersects with mass culture as the progressive urge, instinct, and impulse to awakening; inclusion; psychic hypertrophy unto wholeness — again, at the personal, collective, and universal level(s).

Genius can also be an entire cultural movement, such as the invention of baseball; the progression of modern baseball and the inclusion of images — of someone like Hank Greenberg being one of the greatest players of his generation; receiving the Most Valuable Player Award during this period of time of the absolute rise of power in Germany that is occurring with Hitler and the uh political ideological rhetoric around Jewish people. Baseball starts out as a game of mud, dirt, and wood; becomes a aperture of the radical inclusionary force of consciousness as the primary cultural artifact of the most influential world empire in modern history. The way it digests and metabolizes itself. And thus a player like Satchel Paige — who grew up without shoes in the violently racist American South of Mobile Alabama in the earliest years of the 1900s — can radically revolutionize and take part in the cultural upheaval of cultural and political bigotry against black people in America; play a critical role in this cosmic overturning unto psychic wholeness. Culture itself becomes a way, a mechanism for and through which the hypertrophy of the collective psyche at a national and global scale — particularly through participation; in a sport such as baseball — to vanguard this metabolism, knowingly or unknowingly, into an accelerated existence. As an apt metaphor… a healthy metabolic state is essential for the survival and thriving of the organism as a whole.

12:11

This is a movement of expansion of the aperture of humanism and the consciousness of Jewish humanity and not only Jewish humanity, but Jewish greatness and strength and ability and talent — in its darkest hour and moment of need. Because as everyone can see at this point, Hank Greenberg is performing at the absolute top of his game.

And again, this occurs throughout the rise — as we discussed with Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige — and the increasing saturation of institutionalized black baseball images of black excellence through the performance and abilities of Robinson, Paige, or Larry Doby or Minoso. These are all instances that are occurring through culture as a media outlet, as a way of expressing and presenting and representing images which are expanding the narrative cultural aperture in the collective consciousness — of inclusion. Of humanity, of a cosmological expansion of the possible or the domain of the real or the appropriate or the true, which itself is a revolutionary political force at the foundation — because that consciousness shift is actually what needs to occur in order for real political change and political shift to occur and not just immediately snap back into the previous mode or saturation of consciousness which existed prior. There must be a rising in awareness and collective metabolism to occur at the psychic level as in a revelation and incorporation of the incited dark or forgotten or refused material into the collective aperture… to be metabolized and thus incorporated into the collective body; processed as an energetic force which materializes as real political change. Perhaps the most soluble metaphor here is the ancient Hindu myth of Shiva transmuting the poison from the depths of the ocean and saving the world — he transmutes it in his throat. That’s why his throat is blue.

13:40

So you could think of the collective consciousness itself as an evolutionary device. It would be to… say you were going to give an ape without an opposable thumb, you were just going to give an ape a pencil and you were going to ask it to write. And maybe for that moment you helped it hold the pencil while it was writing. And the moment you drew your hand away, the pencil would fall away and it would struggle to hold that pencil as a tool or an instrument… because the opposable thumb had not yet been instituted as a technology, a part of that body or the aperture of the consciousness which would allow for that increasing or progressive ability to perform a certain motion or movement or action.

So you can think of the collective consciousness in a social political sense as a technological body.

And what needs to be added is always already an integrative quality which actually expands its aperture of the true or the real or the possible. Each age is crying out for the next age that will resolve its contradictions which express themselves as its political limitations.

So today, of course, you have the Copernican Revolution. That's widely accepted for the most part, right? There are still people who will dispute it. There's maybe people who will talk about flat earth or things along those lines. They'll have their own conceptions. But for the most part, the Copernican Revolution is widely accepted, even among those who are not cosmologically or astronomically literate.

14:34

This has become a cultural institution. It's become a permanent shift in the way that we perceive the cosmological reality of humanity and the solar system itself. But during Copernicus' time, this was heretical. Copernicus was persecuted for this realization. But this, in a way, is the sort of martyrdom of genius, which is common to history — just in the same way that Greenberg makes this advancement through democratic culture.

So does Galileo make his advancement, where both figures, right, as you understand, are persecuted. Galileo as a revolutionary intellectual genius who destroys the old conceptual order and paradigm and forces a reckoning of the perceived realities and truths of the universe at the collective cultural level; Greenberg as a revolutionary genius of democratic presence which changes the way that humanity is perceived and constructed in his very embodied being; way of being.

But in the process of their persecution, they actually are advancing the aperture of human consciousness, but in slightly different ways. And I would actually say in radically different ways, because what Galileo is doing is he's institutionalizing a new vision of reality. But Hank Greenberg, I would say on another level and in another realm is... he's embodying an expansion in the consciousness at a national and even a global level of what is human, who is human, what is meaningful, who is meaningful. This is a very, very, very humanistic mode, which is beyond just the maybe the abstract cosmology of the universe. It’s foundational in and at the level of lived experience and the political, existential consequence of being human in the realm of the everday. At the end of the day, for most people existentially, it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the sun revolves around the earth or the earth revolves around the sun in a Copernican sense.

15:57

But it matters deeply on an everyday political, social, and cultural level, who is included and who is excluded in a national and global sense in terms of humanity itself. So this is the action that culture performs at its most foundational level in terms of embodiment, in terms of the expansion of inclusion, in a real political human sense… whether that's Hank Greenberg as a Jewish person in the midst of the persecution of the Nazis — or whether that's Jackie Robinson integrating baseball and being one of the greatest precedents to the civil rights movement in America that would gain full force just ten years after his integration of the sport.

So this is where culture itself kind of gains a second wind after genius. Because we have Einstein and the theory of relativity or his understanding of space time. This is something that's not so applicable in a democratic sense to most peoples’ lives. They may understand it in a very superficial way, or it may become institutionalized philosophically as a way of understanding reality. But that will remain with a small group of people, just as much as maybe an artistic innovation and the perception of consciousness will remain with those who are art critics or who consume art, which is usually a kind highfalutin, bourgeois pursuit — such as maybe the innovations of van Gogh or Artaud, which are undeniably revolutions of perception. van Gogh is a little more populist than Artaud, so to speak, but these are aesthetic revolutions that remain in the realm of the beautiful and the abstract. And they're not so much integrated into a direct immediate consciousness of the everyday in a proletarian democratic sense — of the perception of reality and how we engage and interact with reality. One another, the earth, et cetera.

17:52

Because the human experience is very immediate aperture. It's sensual. It's mostly in the milieu of the human. The direct consequences of our communities, trade; how we establish our gardens and cities. It's very anthropological, anthropomorphic, human-based, human-centered. It's not based in the quantum realm, right? At least, not for the most part. That which we experience is primarily animal. Its founded in the aperture of the animal and animality. This is just the truth of the current, existent collective aperture of humanity. The requisite revolution there would have to be at a mass, evolutionary, biological level — for and toward a collective genius that would perceive beyond that aperture of the human into the eternal, or the infinite. We have precedent for that historically, but this level of form of genius is an anomaly. It’s not the current collective evolutionary terrain.

So that's in groups and out groups. That's social hierarchies. That's status symbols. That's... our conception of humanity. So when we're talking about borders or we're talking about international conflict or we're talking about racism… we're talking about segregation, or we're talking about slavery or exclusion or caste systems or economics — we're talking about the everyday things that determine human life and human possibility. And humanity is the aperture through which consciousness evolves through us — as a participatory realm — where we are directly participating in the evolutionary unfolding of existence and the cosmos itself through psyche and revelation.

18:50

And when we gesture to revolutionary culture or the possibility of culture being revolutionary, we're talking about the use of culture and culture itself as a way of creating images, the way of creating apertures or lenses of reality and experiences which really essentially either humanize or dehumanize. The way of constructing events, temples, places of witnessing and participating in the human experience — places which, themselves — through their sheer nature and reality of being events and forms and architectures through which we unfold our humanity… reveal to us these deep psychic contradictions and paradoxes; create and are creating through us and our cultures — ways, spaces, and places for us to resolve them as a form of a theatrical witnessing of revelation upon the field of history and time itself. This is just as much war as it is baseball, as it is the importance of architecture in everyday life. We are designing experiences. And it is a question of how consciously we can do that; furthermore, of how powerfully certain moments in history align to reveal the profound spiritual importance of revelation in the architecture of our everyday lives — such as this revolutionary intersection of the spiritual heroism of Hank Greenberg amidst the emergent world of anti-semitic bigotry and fascism. It is to the point that you begin to think and feel there is a higher purpose unfolding through him. That he is standing and shining toward a integral moment of consciousness itself. As a force of revelation and enlightenment. And again, this is the historical function of avataric genius.

19:20

So there's a way, of course… and you see it in news media all the time, is that the narratives that are being propagated, the images that are being used and the rhetoric that's being used to construct political realities will be a sort of war of perception.

And so there may be someone or a group of people who benefit (in the most immediate and retrogressive way) by dehumanizing a certain person or a certain series of groups, because there's an economic or political benefit to creating that sort of status construction or that hierarchy of power. This benefit, historically and physically, is a temporary one. To destabilize an ecosystem or create the appearance of an unreality (such as dehumanization or subjugation of any form of life or another human being) always has an equal and opposite reaction. Nature does not tolerate untruth, at least not for long.

And so that's that's what I would call conventionally conservative culture. Conservative culture will be a culture that separates or divides. And in that sense, traditionalizes or normalizes a power structure or hierarchy of being a humanization or a dehumanization, which is really historically how most cultures have functioned. This is a backwards method — a method which appeals to primordial animal reason and social function as a viable way of being into the future. It is an appeal to a theology of humanity as a violent Old Testament animal which functions only in power relations; competition. This is the old and tired myth of innovation only emerging from competition; not from the desire to better life ecosystemically. It is a myth that must exist to protect the violence of inequality.

There's been the slave class, or there's been the laboring class, or there's been the racial minority which is given certain minimized privileges and minimized rights in relationship to the racial majority or the racial empowered in any given civilization or uh empire — which is then given these different privileges based on its divine rights or whatever the narrative is. This is the immature pattern of the vast majority of human history as a raising of self important individuals through the culturual apparatus of perception, while propogating the perception of others as less than, inhuman, or deserving of less. It is a pattern typical of the attempt to assert a violent animal dominance through the institution of a psychic aperture through culture into political law — protected by, at last, violent force to preserve the psychic fragility of the aspect of the collective mind most resistant to hypertrophic inclusivity. To new information, new knowledge, new ways of being. To community; to others. Power, in this sense, exists where true community doesn’t.

20:45

Again, culture is and civilizations are — narratologies. They're ways of constructing being and they're an apparatus. They're a way of seeing. And their way of seeing is jurisdiction through culture. It's determined through culture as a way of narrativizing the construct of humanity as it pertains to and exists in this certain space and time. Culture comes first, long before the space of political legislation. Culture is the way that political consciousness forms, shifts; is possible; made possible.

Hegel would call this the spirit of the age. It's the way in which the aperture of consciousness is being constructed, which is so much so part of the larger milieu of the social and cultural thought of the time. It's the way in which consciousness is being constructed through this massive historical force which is moving like a snowball through time and is gathering steam through rhetoric, through argumentation, through perceived revolution of different ideas and theorems and conceptions of reality. So this is everything from Copernicus to Hitler to Galileo to Stalin. These are all sort of mimetic cultural forces, which are actively shaping — they're like hands that are shaping this massive collective structure of consciousness itself. And that massive collective structure itself is an incredible, incredible force, and that force is barreling through history, it's barreling through time and space.

And so when you have this moment where the collective consciousness is becoming increasingly contracted around this idea of Jewish ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism, you have this figure, it's almost this counter protesting progressive figure of Hank Greenberg… who emerges into the collective consciousness and is actually standing as this one figure against this incredible, incredible cultural and political force and power. It's this thrust that is occurring globally.

22:35

One of the quotes that I was thinking about in relationship to this is by Buckminster Fuller. You never change things by fighting the existing reality to change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. So this is exactly what culture is in relation to consciousness.

If you think about consciousness as a sculpture that's being informed through time… even if you just wanted to relegate it to the realm of the human; the human itself — let's say the hardware is a slowly shifting aperture of the development of the synapses; the nervous system, the organs, the veins and the way that blood pumps through the body, the development of the heart as sophisticated technological, biological and chemical constructs which are moving up through the genetic chain of the human being through space and through time, through reproduction. And that itself is kind of the foundational, it's like the... the basic building blocks, it's like the skeleton of that sculpture. This is the realm historically of the intense and profound anatomical studies of da Vinci.

But that sculpture is being informed in a more fleshly sense, a more morphous sense by culture, by history — by epigenetic happenings and unfoldings and events, which are continually shifting and shifting and shifting the way in which that hardware, which again is the sense body, which Kant again would call judgment… through which that sense body is judging and shaping and shifting the aperture or the lens of its perception itself. So culture is working in and with and among the human body, right? As a force of evolution and revolution of consciousness as a mass universal unfolding of psychic revelation unto reality; wholeness.

Taste, touch, um sight, the different ways in which we engage with the world itself through the aperture of the sense body, right? The being or the organism, which is slowly, glacially changing over time. That in itself is an evolution of consciousness which is more profound because it will actually change the species itself. The species will, in all likelihood — in light of history — become an entirely new species through that process. But in the shorter time scale away, from that deep time evolution of the organism itself, at a shorter time scale… you have this arbitration and evolution of consciousness through culture as the hypertrophic aperture through which different political movements happen. First through culture; then emergent into the legislative whole of how our societies are shaped. Culture is the vanguard for the emergence of the suppressed, repressed, dissociated materials. It is the vanguard for the unconscious — because it is the theatre in which we find and express and seek our humanity. Just as dreams and the realm of the poets is where the psyche first encounters the unknown; seeks and hopes to reconcile the infinite; the total depth of history as experienced viscerally; in human clothes… with the light of day.

24:57

So even if you just wanted to think about the 20th century, the human being has remained almost exactly the same in terms of the hardware through which it is perceiving… but through movements such as existentialism, through movements such as World War II, through movements such as industrialization, or the smartphone, or artificial intelligence, or the radical conservative movements of the early 2020s around the world; through the pandemic that occurred in 2020… there's these different moments historically that are changing the aperture and the lens of perception in terms of how the human being as a form of consciousness relates to the world and relates to the self.

So that's everything from Camus to James Baldwin to Donald Trump. These are all different ways in which that cultural aperture is being directed and redirected, shifted and shaped by perception. A war and battleground of images and perceptions and their adoption as perceived realities; truths — which then sculpt our cultural words, worlds, and versions of existence. This is the perceptual mechanism which then builds the stone of our forms — buildings, laws, truisms carved into the corroding and corroded civilizational statues of that human attempt to achieve the real through a collective sight; foresight, insight.

26:56

What is so powerful about culture, especially in terms of the production and consumption and creation of images, is that it is a way of expanding the realm or the framework of the known possible or the perceived possible. And the way that it does so is by imaginatively altering the bounds of the way that we judge the world. So there may be a certain point at which my conception of the world ends. That, Blaise Pascal, the philosopher would say — God is the cultural limit. It's that… just after the point of the furthest that we can conceive of reality or truth, there's God, right? It's the lapse in consciousness between this is as far as I can go and perceive and know and see and be. And beyond that is the unknown. Beyond that is the just beyond me.

And so with consciousness, as we discussed in the previous essay with Satchel Paige, in this process of the spiritual hypertrophy of consciousness — consciousness is always evolving towards God in terms of being more incorporated and more integrative and integrated. Re-assembling and re-unifying the fragmented parts founded in the creation of the incarnate being in relation to the world. Psychic hypertrophy is a remembrance and remembering of the world as innately and fundamentally as self. Even through the aperture of the organism; the programming of the organism — which is convinced of its perceived individuality and isolation in the world as a wandering body in relation to the distant, unknown cosmological whole. This is the existential experience of humanity as the creation of spirituality, religion, myth…. all of it. To find our way home.

And what's what's so powerful about this moment… with Hank Greenberg, American baseball and the Jewish ethnic consciousness in relation to this international moment of intense, intense subjugation and scapegoating — which is itself just such a massive part of the fabric of one of the most important moments of the 20th century, which is World War II. Hank Greenberg rises through the aperture of the American political consciousness on the field of baseball, the theater of the American subconscious of baseball — America’s Greek theatre of Olympic, its Yankee Stadium Aeschylus — through which America projects and wrestles and grapples with its own, undigested psychic image of itself… and receives this Most Valuable Player Award.

27:54

Again, right in the middle of uh Hitler's Olympics and just a year after the Nuremberg laws. Amidst the rising fervor of fascism and anti-semitism in the United States as an emergent perceived global solutions to the realities, problems, and contradictions of human consciousness in a rising global modernity.

This is extremely important as an image… for this image to be published in the Detroit Times and for this image to be published nationally. Because it says something radically different than the mass international, mass collective human consciousness descent into fragmentation and retrogression into the primordial mode and fury of war as separation that's occurring at this moment in time, especially through World War II — as even more globalized than World War I; the most globalized war in human history.

And through that mass... moment in movement of information that is all around the subjugation and oppression of the Jewish subject as a scapegoat and as a perceived ethnic anomaly in the history of humanity, Hank Greenberg is being published nationally and even internationally, receiving the Most Valuable Player Award in America's most important cultural theater. America being the rising figure of power, force, and influence on the global stage of modernity — to be, in many ways, sworn into this post upon the completion of the second World War.

29:12

Again, the power of cultural images as a counter movement against this massive ideological push and thrust, which is this stone of history barreling through space time, which is gathering steam amidst all of this different propaganda and all of these different ideological constructs which are circulating through pamphlets, through images, through posters. This is a critical turning point in the global movement of consciousness. A deeply interconnected world through trade and transportation technology. A rising consciousness of the shattering of the old agrarian, localized forms of conception of self and other. A truly interconnected world emerging; the outbursts of profound violence at the loss of the old world. Looking for someone to blame. Consciousness is stepping out into a profound new terrain of the unknown. It is stepping into God as the integral, foundational force of integration and wholeness that erases whole paradigms and forces the human construct to build entirely anew from the rubble of all that it believed it once was.

A Copernican Revolution at the root of the falsity of the perceived reality and conception of humanity. A deeper revelation of truth which is indisputable, undeniable; shattering all that was once known upon the global stage. Humanity is trying to find a way to cope. Anything. Including seeking out a scapegoat, a target — for which it can blame the failing of the old order upon — a failing which was built into the untruth of its establishment. A failing which is nothing more or less than a lack of knowledge of the nature of reality being brought to light at a mass collective level. An incongruity of conception, perception, and reality.

29:41

Again, right, this is the cultural warfare that is occurring here. And this really is a moment of one of the most direct and visceral confrontations that baseball has at a global human scale — in terms of what baseball can truly do. It’s one of the most powerful hidden and unacknowledged moments of the integral power of culture in the 20th century; across modernity itself. It is the full realization of how and what culture is, does, can do, and functions at the deep psychological level of consciousness integration; wholeness as a force through which images and myths can reveal and create and make space for the always already possible. The always already true. Even in the midst of profound fragmentation, trauma, fear, violence; the loss of the synthetic old; the profound emptiness, void, and despair of the failure of the old ways in the midst of the emergence of the new. The deeper truth.

Baseball being America's most important cultural form during this period of time and for most of the early 20th century… what culture can do as a way of actually radically shifting consciousness and transforming the perception of the possible and integrating beyond the bounds of the limits of the subject, right? Again, because the subject is the human and anything beyond the subject is the other, which is the oppressed class or the disjected. In the same way that the human and the animal are delimited — when in reality they are just two parts of the same whole — the process of the unfolding and evolution of consciousness itself as and in the universal principle; the totality of the powers of existence itself.

31:07

And one of the most important moments of Hank Greenberg's life at the end of his career… is the conversation that he has with Jackie Robinson as Jackie Robinson begins to integrate baseball — as Hank Greenberg is leaving it.

The connection there is incredibly visceral because Greenberg and Robinson, both of them, are part of — if not the two most important figures in terms of the integration of baseball or the integrative quality of baseball as a way, culturally, through images, through theater, through presence and embodiment… as a way, culturally, to expand consciousness.

Greenberg and Robinson, perhaps more so than any other figure in baseball history, themselves are in many ways Newton and Einstein in terms of the impact at a level of cultural genius which is profound consciousness human heroism — what is necessary in these moments… of profound contraction and the bigotry that both Greenberg and Robinson experienced during these moments in time in human history and the evolution of the political consciousness of humanity proper.

Greenberg is so much more site-specific, space-time-specific in the moment of this heightened, heightened moment of Jewish discrimination worldwide. It’s an incredibly acute moment of extremity. And Greenberg is… through this incredible and powerful synchronicity, rising to the absolute heights of American baseball at this exact moment. And he continues to rise through it. Again, he says, it got to a point where every homerun I hit, it felt like I was hitting it against Hitler. So he's known to this day as one of the most important heroes in Jewish American communities and Jewish communities at large because he was really one of the only, if not the only, figures who was standing up on a global and national stage and showing this Jewish humanness, showing this Jewish skill and ability as it pertained to a cultural artifact in human history, which itself became a lens and an aperture, again, a vision and an image of what's possible in an integrative capacity at the level of consciousness itself.

And this again is expanding, not just at a personal level, it's expanding at a collective, at a human species level. And cosmologically, at a universal level in deep time and deep space. The awareness of humanity, of integration, of the network of existence itself, which for most people is mostly relegated to the anthropological — which again is why Greenberg and Robinson are different and perhaps even more important than Galileo and Einstein.

It's easy to say we have these great intellectual figures who changed the cosmological conception of human reality forever, but most people don't engage with that sphere. Most people are living on the flat realm of everyday daily existence, food, water, shelter, work, community, and cultural digestion of proletarian, democratic artifacts such as baseball, or whether that's football or soccer or... whatever the sports are or whatever the collective things are, maybe it's folk music or dance. Olympics, et cetera.

But when you look at baseball through this aperture and especially in American history, you're looking at really one of the most radical cultural movements of modernity, especially in a moment like this with Hank Greenberg and then again with Robinson. And a large part of that has to do with institutionalization and media as a way of projecting and disseminating political consciousness as a form and construct en masse as an information technology.

This has gotten to the point where Greenberg can't be ignored. He's being published nationally as this Jewish American star, this Jewish American hero receiving the most important award in baseball over players like Ruth or Gehrig in 1936. So you have this moment of actually radical revolutionary political consciousness in America — which is emerging entirely through its cultural form and apparatus in which Greenberg is participating. Its intent is not even to be revolutionary. It is documentarian of the very real achievements Greenberg is accomplishing in the cultural pursuit of baseball in America; baseball’s importance to America itself. That is all this is about. And that’s precisely what makes it and this moment and its dissemination so radical and so revolutionary. It’s an innocuous moment of cultural achievement at the peak and height of the American cultural artifact which is pushing back actually against the dominant political impulse in America and in the world at the time — an impulse toward contraction; separation, bigotry.

34:39

An impulse, in large part, which was that Jewish people were suspect or that they had a quality about them that was criminal or evil or improper. And here's Greenberg graciously accepting the award for most valuable player on America’s professional stage. An embodied example, no actor, of Jewish American excellence, talent, and greatness. In the cultural form that captivates all of America — first before its politics. The real attention that is taken and kept to baseball — the true technological and cultural form of its communal importance, self concept, and political imagination.

So this is all to say that culture itself, and especially proletarian democratic culture such as baseball, can be profound… and if not can be — are our profound revolutionary apertures for the expansion of consciousness. And again, it's just these moments of incredible historical synchronicity, such as Greenberg and Robinson, albeit Robinson less so. I think it's more of a timeless moment. It's this movement of integration of baseball and the political underground of black baseball… is in this moment of collision. It's on this collision course. There’s an inevitability… this long train of modernity. After World War II, the commissioner makes this statement about black soldiers fighting along white alongside white soldiers — I don't see why they shouldn't be able to play baseball together. In this collision course, finally — to the resolution of the inherent contradictions writ into the American Constitution itself, 200 years prior.

But with Greenberg I think it's different… because there's this massive, massive global uprising in fascism which is something that historical thinkers like Carl Jung had a kind of prescient idea was emerging in large part due to industrialization and the loss of the folk or agrarian local consciousness that Nietzsche discusses towards the end of the 1800s with the death of God. Carl Jung anticipates this rise in this radical political regressive backlash due to the loss of the cultural foundations of Germany at that period of time. And the wish to return to what was lost… because what was lost in this new modern political moment of globalization and industrialization is becoming increasingly less of a possibility at all. It was, in many ways, the way we conceived of ourselves as human; humans. Our perception and conception of humanity being actively shattered by technological revolution and the winds of change. Of social progress. Of the massive gale force winds of integration shifting the literal foundations of how the world operates and operated. Becoming increasingly interconnected.

The fabric of what was, what determined the identity and the consciousness of the collective is fading away. And again, these are the moments of cultural vacuum, cultural loss of identity, when there is this fragmentation and chaos that occurs. This chaos in terms of fear and the death of self can very easily grip an entire population without a narrative balance to hang on to. And as we see, as in the case with the early 20th century, these moments can arise incredibly quickly — especially through increasingly onset and scaffolding technological revolution and innovation. Scientific innovation. Worlds can overturn irrevocably at and on the ground level in an instant.

And these are the moments where this cultural war of consciousness is at its most extreme — there's this intense desire to go back to what was previously known because now the collective breach is that moment of stepping into the unknown where the previous paradigm no longer works or functions and the future paradigm is not yet there. There’s a profound, deep nervous system, organismic level fear that occurs in these moments. Because the collective, communal, cultural foundations are uprooted. The safety of what was is gone. The enclave of the cave of the past has been thrust out into a historical open.

37:28

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian economist, philosopher, and revolutionary said — the old age is gone and the new age is not yet here. Now is the time of monsters. It's the monster being the political unconsciousness rearing its head. The fear of humanity. The chaos and uncertainty manifest as the roaring fascism, scapegoating, bigotry. The fear of dissolution. The fury of the egoic survival. The desperation.

And of course, that's exactly what you see in Nazi Germany in terms of this intense and immense scapegoating that is occurring.

37:57

And this is a political consciousness that grips the world into the breach of World War II. This is a powerful moment of heroism, cosmic heroism even, with Greenberg, because he's stepping existentially as one man into this breach as the Jewish American political and cultural hero through baseball, again, through culture — through the lens of embodied culture, which is incredibly profound and important because he's not on the field of war.

38:26

He's on the field of baseball. A sport of aesthetic movement and striving. Athletic heroism. He's on the field of athletic aesthetic achievement and sporting achievement as a signal and symbol of Jewish excellence, just as Robinson does the same a decade later. He’s enduring profound bigotry and attempts to trip him up or break his spirit. And he’s rising. Becoming even better. Standing ever and even more deeply in contrast to this political descent into chaos and unconsciousness; regression. He’s evolving. Through the darkness. But he's doing this as, again, an individual man — existentially standing in the breach of this extreme political fermentation, not just on the American stage, but on the international stage as really the only prominent Jewish cultural figure who is performing these feats of profound excellence. Greenberg and Einstein. Greenberg as an embodied manifestation. Einstein as an intellectual revolutionary; cosmological revolutionary; humanitarian. But Greenberg is upon the embodied field of play of the demos. He is in the pits of Tartarus.

So again, this is why he grips the cultural stage not only in America in a national sense, but internationally across different Jewish communities. And he achieves renown internationally for what he's doing. Even in places where baseball is not known; is not perceived in the same matter and manner of importance. Because people innately and intuitively understand this form of embodied heroism. It’s a spiritual heroism of rising through striving. Through incarnation. Through the body.

39:19

So it's just moments like that that if you look at it through that anthropological lens, you look at the greatest geniuses of human history, maybe Einstein and Da Vinci, I could just say those two off the top of my head. They revolutionized what's possible in a very highfalutin, again, genius sense. People can grasp their ideas in a relatively democratic way when they're translated.

But the genius itself is something that resides almost exclusively in the realm of genius — and remains there as a very, very, very exclusive realm of innovation and mastery and ability. But when you have a figure like Hank Greenberg in the moment of World War II and Jackie Robinson in 1947, we're talking about profound acts of heroism in which they're stepping into the breach of culture as an exclusionary force, a violent force, violent against Jewish people, violent against Black people… in a national sense in terms of the American nationalism, which is a violent historical force against Black people. And then in Greenberg's sense, which is just, it becomes increasingly more profound to me — in an international sense, in terms of this extreme hatred and anti-Semitism against Jewish people during this period of time where there's an act of genocide.

And that act of genocide is sweeping the world in the biggest world war in human history. This is a lived embodiment upon the field of play among the witnessing and active participation as in the threat of death and violence. It’s an aesthetic sublimation of the carnal and incarnate terror of the unleashing of the unconscious into the world as a political force. And Greenberg and Robinson stand among it and endure. They evolve spiritually to heights of resilience that touch God. They are forces of profound vanguard and revolution. They themselves indelibly impact human consciousness as forces of integration; perform a cosmic, world heroism in their endurance and stature and overcoming. And it is all upon the field and theatre and terrain of baseball as an unleashing and catharsis of the collective consciousness.

40:53

So when you look at this in a consciousness sense, if I was just going to distill it metaphysically, he's standing and the media and players around him… this photo of him receiving the MVP award in 1936, which is sent around the nation and published in the Detroit Times and then is cataloged in the Sporting News Archive Archival Collection in terms of American sporting history.

He is performing this profound act of the heroism of consciousness, the heroism of consciousness through culture, through which he is seeding an expansion, a progressive revelation through integration on a global stage of consciousness itself in the realm of the human. Even in the midst of a global dark of chaos and uncertainty — wherein the worst instincts and impulses of humanity are unleashed in the face of a tipping paradigm into a profound new unknown. In the breach, chaos. In the breach, Greenberg rises.

So again, we are here to be human beings. are incarnated as human beings for the human experience. The highest possible outcome of our human reality… in sense that the highest self or the highest spiritual totality in which human beings can participate in the unfolding of the universe is to integrally expand consciousness through the human, through being human, expand our lens and aperture for what is possible — what is real, what is human, what is included in the grand cosmology of all of life. And that's again what heroism is in a purely consciousness sense, is that we are incarnated as human beings to expand. Expand the possibility of knowing, of being, of including, of creating. And this is on the most ground level in terms of the democratic proletarian sport of baseball — the most inclusive, ritual, cultural, national artifact of American history; the most embodied one, the most personal, the most direct. This is not acting. It's not Hollywood. These are the real lives and the real feats. Greenberg is really standing in the face of those who wish to destroy him. And he rises.

44:05

Real feats of athletic and sporting skill and ability that are America's cultural theater, and again, America's political conscience and consciousness. Even aesthetically; perhapse foremost because they are aesthetic feats of striving and will. They are purified towards the absolute. They are against nothing. They are towards the perfection and discipline of the craft. The spiritual discipline of the honing of the mind, the body, the soul.

So for Greenberg to do this is in defiance of all of the myths that are currently being propagated and circulating and contracting the political conscience — contracting the political consciousness and the spirit of the age into this incredibly profound fear-based exclusionary, separative, low, low, low vibrational density. A dark fear-based paradigm of the emergence of global fascism and the rise of Hitler's Nazi Germany to power by way of the rhetoric against the Jewish people, the ideology of the Jewish people to be exterminated.

This is one of the darkest moments in modern human history, if not the darkest moment. And Greenberg stands as man in this breach, in this void. And he not only performs and performs this heroic task in almost superhuman Sisiphyean way. He gets better. He just keeps getting better. He's rising through this darkness.

It's not it's not even that this darkness is pulling him down or subtracting from his ability or his vision. He's actually becoming greater through it. And as such, he's acting as this single man. This single existential man is acting as a counterbalance against an entire world historical movement. Standing in the face of it and rising through it. This level of embodied cultural heroism is so, it's just incredibly profound. And again, this is the lived experience. This is not an idea. He's not circulating an idea. This is not an idea to change the world. It's not a Copernican idea or one of Einstein's ideas. It's not quantum mechanics.

This is the embodied experience of a man on a baseball field performing. With people in the stands and players on the field who are in many ways at war with him and what he represents in terms of actually embodying and incarnating and moving as a figure and force of enlightenment and progressive revolution unto psychic wholeness at a collective level. This is the avataric, messianic level and function of consciousness in its most literal, direct, incarnate, and embodied form; in its state and face of deepest paradox and contrast. A historical collision of heroism and darkness.

46:38

The athletic embodied performance, the gesture and the movement of the physical body to achieve and to achieve greatness. This again is probably the most mythic realm and the most mythic field of embodied culture and physical culture and embodied physical culture — and the generated images through embodied physical culture as a radical counterbalance to exclusion segregation, racism, bigotry, genocide, violence… because we're talking about the rising and raising of consciousness through cultural media. Through cultural outcomes and through the cultural theater — to expand the consciousness of all of humanity.

And of course baseball is just one of the ways to do that, and photography. This could be art. This could be film.

47:08

But there is really something about the embodied theater of baseball and the athletic theater of baseball as it's been cataloged and presented and changed throughout American historical time. Again, America is one of, if not the predominant modern empire and modern civilization in terms of influence and revolution of consciousness at a global level and scale — and the importance of baseball in American empire is not a coincidence. It's a direct connection to the way that America conceives of itself spiritually; conceives of itself as a political subject, especially through the embodied striving and the aesthetic skill and ability of baseball as a game of strategy, will, and revelation of consciousness in the face of perceived fate as unconsciousness. Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 1955 World Series is a choice. An act of daring. A representation of the revelation of black greatness unfolding upon the mythic field and legendary history of the diamond. Of America’s consciousness. Of the world stage of the evolution of consciousness of humanity. Of the cosmic stage of the evolution of consciousness proper. The long history. From single cells; stars; origins — to aesthetic, cultural revelation — embodied revelation — of the depths of who we are.

47:47

So to have Greenberg be presented with this award here in 1936 in the fall is perhaps one of the most profound moments, pinpoint moments — not just on a national stage in terms of American history and the history of American civilization, but the global moments, movement, and projection that is occurring in consciousness at that moment in time. And for modernity itself as a revelation of the interconnection of all of humanity and all of life in a profound and grand unity. And the struggle to metabolize and digest that in the loss of the old world orders — old world orders based on fractured perception; enclaves of lived experience of being. Humanity is being thrust into profound interrelation. And the backlash and fear of the new is visceral. A new paradigm of consciousness is opening up; the gulf of the unknown is yawning; seeming abyssal… but is in fact the deeper new of transformative perception and relation of and to self. It’s very similar to the nervous system patterns of trauma. They are habituated. In the face of the new; healing from those patterns, there can be a great fear. The unknown appears wounding — when it is in fact a greater salve than has ever before been known. This is the historical archetypal gift of Christ; the gift of all great genius — the consciousness and avataric integrative force of consciousness itself.

He's really standing in the face of the spirit of the age.

And creating a counter narrative which is undeniable. Again, this is a political force, this is political agency in this moment in time in human history. It's incredibly profound political agency through culture as an apparatus to change paradigms. So that's what I got. I'll catch you all in the next one.

The Revelation of the Hidden Essence, Character & Nature of Time as it Emerges Through the Early Cuban Baseball Photograph

Jul 29, 2025

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00:01

So I want to get kind of technical here and talk about the quality of time as it passes through the photograph as an object and what the soul or the character of the photograph acquires through the passage of time.

This itself being a sort of aura or an added character, which is present at the moment of time of the creation of the photograph. Particularly how the artisanal method of photography functioned in the early 1900s; particularly with cabinet photography and silver gelatin photography.

But what occurs in the process of the historical accumulation of time is and becomes the real quality of what we experience in a modern context of the photo through its process of aging and age. So this is the full embodied, almost distilled character of the object as it passes through time. It's the emulsion, the chemical emulsion of light that occurs in and through the image of itself, which gives the object its transcendental character.

01:54

So when we talk about significant artifacts or works of art, my main argument or my main sort of speech to that would be that the quality of the meaning of the artifact, particularly regarding a photographic object, emerges through its engagement with light and time as a passage.

So we're talking about the movement of an object that interacts and reacts chemically through space-time in relationship to light, in relationship to weather, in relationship to ecosystem, which again is light and shadow, heat and temperature, humidity, wetness, dampness and dryness, and exposure to various different elemental forces and factors.

So what we're really talking about is a fundamental transcendental principle, a sort of first principle or an a priori rule of all things in space and in time as bodies that are objects that weather and they weather time. This is to me the utmost power and meaning of the photographic object as artifact.

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All of the images that I'm showing you here are from the early 1900s. Some are from Cuba, and some are from the United States of America. And what you can see, the prime differential here, is that actually the quality of the weather is so drastically different in terms of what these objects wear.

03:49

It's almost as if their character itself anticipates the futurity which they step into. The time in which they were made or the timeliness in which they were made was a brief present and they step out of the present and accrue this deeper, greater meaning. Not even necessarily through the space between historical phenomenon, as in the events that occur between the period of time in which this photographic event occurs — photograph is taken, and now… but rather through the actual embodied, incarnate experience of the photographic body as it moves through space-time and thus acquires new characteristics and new traits which can't be anticipated by time or by a sort of prophetic instinct or impulse.

The object, when it is incarnated, the image is rendered, the photograph is developed, the capturing of light is fulmigated or fomented and distilled into the image, which it is through the process of chemical rendering. But then there is the interaction with that chemical body of the image with the forces and factors multiple of time, which again, we discussed — is the weather.

It's the quality of light, heat, humidity, and the forces of nature and the elements which act upon the object. This photograph here might actually be prime example.

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05:52

It is a 1901 photograph of Almendares, the baseball club from Cuba.

So here you're looking at an artifact of the work of time. So the artist of this photograph is the body of time. There's a human contribution in the creation of the image object, but the body of time is actually actively working on this object through the space of Cuba, through the environmental economy of Cuba. It's participating in a ritual distillation of space and time which is the accumulation of the weather of the object. It creates the artifact as we know it today.

If the preservation of this photograph were perfect and it retained the exact qualities of the period of time in which it was created, in terms of a lack of weather, it would have a vastly different character and personality.

06:59

And that character and personality would be muted. Would be a behind glass sort of silencing of the work of time. And this muting would be an impulse to preserve the object from the fear of time or the fear of the encounter of time. But this object has obviously fully encountered time in terms of the weather and wear that it embodies. And as such, it it shapeshifts through the mutual relationship between the humanity which creates numbers and casts this image — that relationship between the development of chemical light through the emulsion process of the photograph itself, and then furthermore… the giving of this object up to time for time to do the work which creates the actual transcendental work of art that we experience and we witness by engaging this artifact 125 years into the future.

So this object is, it's a primordial projection. And really what you witness and experience and engage with this object and this artifact is a passage. It's a prolonged passage of accumulation — a primordial accumulation of the nature of time that this object wears and displays through its experience of that passage. And that is the power of which the artifact presents to you first and foremost, even before you engage with and encounter the history of what's being depicted therein, the figures or the historical moments or the historical formation of the team or where the individuals are present.

So before context, right, or before meaning, before the... the ground, the historical ground is explored — you encounter the body of the object and have the transcendental experience of the medium of time first, which is first and foremost and becomes first and foremost the prime creator of the artifact. And that all historical objects, artifacts, and works of art, object creations, are given up fundamentally and primarily to the work of time.

09:42

And the more thoroughly they are given up to receive that experience and process of time, the more thoroughly the work of art of time is created upon, within, and through them. So this is the experience of the transcendental body of time, which can only almost be experienced and resolved through the chemical emulsion of the photograph as an artifact.

Because what it does is it transforms the image, transfigures the image. It's a sort of ritual chemical magic that is performed through the representation of the image, and particularly the photographic representation of the image — as it is a chemical emulsion upon photographic paper that creates and regenerates and represents the process of light capture and development, which is the early photograph — which is highly artisanal, highly hand engaged, highly photographer and developer engaged.

It's a process of rendering through chemicals, these chemicals that are so explicitly liquid and fluid and light sensitive. So that light sensitivity is a chemical sensitivity to the perception of time — time fundamentally being an experience of the passage of light or intensity of light. So when we talk about space-time, what we're really talking about is an experience of relativity that's generated by the gravitational pull of star systems. So these star systems inform our everyday aperture of the experience of reality through light cones.

11:37

Right? Image, like image generating light cones in the eye, the aperture of the eye, which itself informs the entire relativization of the field of experience, which we digest and metabolize through vision. The quality and power of vision is primary, particularly to the human species in terms of symbols and signs that are used as signposts of navigating the material world.

What something is is perceived first and foremost by the image-centered being or the vision-centered being. It's different for someone who does not have that faculty, blind person, or someone whose image-generating and perceiving faculty is significantly diminished. The quality of an object or what an object appears to be is perceived first imagistically or visually.

And that's metabolized again, representationally, through text. It's a redoubling of that impulse. You perceive a tree, but then you have the word tree, which is a symbolic representation of the direct encounter of the tree itself. This becomes hieroglyphic script which generates and regenerates, redoubles, the experience of the moment or nature of the full bodied liquid volume and body of the tree of time itself.

The spatial, breathing, physical living apparatus and aperture of the tree. The siphons of its roots; the electrical fluid, hue, and color of its chlorophyllic blood. This is a profound magic of symbol and sign making which is native in character and ritual to human history across all borders and bounds. And the photograph inherits this symbolic, redoubling, meaning making urge of language — precisely from Lascaux, or the griot, or the bard of cultural religiosity; the origin story of the universe. It is the creative principle itself which produces and reproduces novelty of meaning through transmutation of heat, light, and thermonuclear fusionary power of force which is the movement of the furnace of the cosmos proper; in fullness of being.

13:02

The power of the photograph is that it is ripped from this more solid sculptural bearing of the gelatinous form or embodied thick viscous form of paint — which itself mimics the sculpture impulse of organized three dimensional bodies of time; incarnal fullnesses of time, dimensional bodies of chemical production and reproduction — paint, which has a higher chemical stability, has a higher density and a higher chemical stability context or content to it as opposed to this very delicate light-sensitive chemical emulsion process which is affixed to the flatness of the photographic paper through the fluidity of the reproduction of light capture in a darkroom baptism. The reproduction is developed in a creational darkness…

‘Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ (Genesis 1:2)

14:05

So I hope you understand… the magic of photography is such that a photograph, a silver gelatin photograph generated in the early 1900s is actually highly chemically unstable. It's highly volatile. It's a medium that can easily be taken over by light and by time. Whereas a oil painting or a sculpture is not so much chemically volatile as it is materially fragile, and as such is subject to material destruction as in fragmentation.

But a photograph like this, especially affixed to a board or a mount as a cabinet photo would be, is much more so, it's in position of higher material stability — but much lower chemical stability.

As such, the photograph is subject to significant transmutation and transformation in such a way that it can actually take on an entirely different character, and especially an entirely different character through destruction of light. We talked about the corrosion of light principle that was active in some of the other essays where we were exploring different artifacts.

15:16

In that corrosion of light principle is the absconding with the incarnate form or differentiation that occurs within the photographic image, such as contrast, which is generated chemically upon the paper… a reproduction of the flattening of the three-dimensional body of the objects being portrayed inside the photograph.

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This is already a creation of volatility through the flattening of the three-dimensional full-bodied moment, which is being depicted through the light capture of the creation of the photograph in terms of the image capture, and then rendering process chemically upon the paper. It's already a creation of a volatile circumstance, and then what you witness is the erasure of the image through light damage, or through the literal weathering or stripping of the paper as such in this photo — which almost resembles an erasure of a glyph upon stone. And the image as such is reduced and corroded to reveal almost the ancient ground upon which it has been inscribed, which is almost like the side of a mountain or a cliff.

16:41

And so in that stripping back and stripping away of the image object, what is revealed is that this paper itself has actually taken on the character of stone in the sense of cementing and solidifying this moment into place. But yet it is chemically volatile, light sensitive stone, almost as if you're viewing through the amber of the chemically generated photographic artifact a crystallization of a historical moment which is being warped through the nature of time and thus pierces into the moment of the creation of the historical artifact itself and reveals.

And what it reveals is not even necessarily the moment itself, but the fundamental essential character and nature of the being of time.

17:39

So this is incredibly powerful, right? Because what the historical photograph reveals and avails us of in terms of understanding is not the moment itself. That would be a deception or a betrayal of the moment in terms of the flattening of the screen of light that is created as a projection, which is the chemically generated flattening of the three-dimensional moment into a false reality of the image. What it is revealing to us is that, through the falsity and projection of this chemically volatile image, through the emulsion of light in the experience of this chemically generated warped transfigured movement of time, we can actually perceive the art of time and as such — perceive, in a reflectory or refractory way… we actually perceive the character and essence of time itself. It is revealed to us through the aperture of the corrosive photographic compound. The chemical affluence of the shapeshifting nature of the very being in time of the photograph itself. It lays bare the riches and the creative hand of the cosmos, of the eternal itself… the godhead. Because time itself becomes the artist of this image — because it's been left to chemical light volatility.

So you can really observe the essence of the being of time. And as such, you're almost, it's almost like you're let in on this transcendental secret in terms of the nature of the weather through the chemical photographic technology.

19:04

This is an incredibly powerful experience, I think, looking at these historical photographs, because each of them develops a different character based on the ecosystem, as in space and place and time and the volatility of the weather, which in itself is the communication of the fragility and how much time has been allowed to enter in and claim and sort of wrap its claws around the image and thus distort it to reveal itself, the true character of being, right?

And that's why I think in particular the Cuban photographs are so profound — is that a lot of the time there was no significant preservation that occurred. Whether or not there was an attempt to preserve, these photographs are very clearly, they have been left to the destructive force of time and that time has worked upon them and time has been allowed to work upon them because of the political, environmental, economic, social and cultural circumstances that occurred between the very early 1900s in Cuba and a modern day context, which is 125 years into the future.

The allowance of this work of time is actually what is appropriate, what is true and what is real, because it allows us to engage with the transcendental artistry, the chemical force and power of transfiguration and transmutation, which is the artistry and creativity of the universe itself as a light body, right? As a interstellar chemical light body which transfigures and transfuses elemental projections which form images, form materializations of different figures and species, so on and so forth.

It actually is an entryway and a gateway into the transcendental metaphysics of nature itself, which is the light language of genetics, the light language of chemical formations and structures and compounds, which then scale. The photographic chemical compound of volatility is the cave wall of the cosmos scrawled upon by ancient time; bison, constellations; zodiacal wheels — upon which we are allowed vision into the secret, sacral unity and form of the formless body of the nature of time itself. The great, invisible beast of force and fluency and power; the thrust of the karmic, starlit wheel which moves through all things.

21:24

It's the scaling of the cellular architecture of being itself through the nutrients, through the ecosystem of nutrients — all of which are different compositions of light, elementally, again, through carbon or through different structural forms, hydrogen, which create fixed material bodies, quote unquote, so to speak.

This is the chemical transfiguration, at an elemental level, as the primary code and symbolic language and mechanism of the light and heat and change over space-time as in the form of the universe made manifest and behold in the action of time in and upon the votive, compound surface and object of the chemically sensitive, artisanal, historical artifact of the photograph. The surface and space of the image-object itself represents, reproduces, and reveals this principle of the chemical admixture. It paints, sketches, and depicts the ancient, hooded figure of time — once only archetype or abstract figural theorem — made embodied in the garment of the chemical photograph in and as sacred passage and art of the universe; the universal whole.

So you're led into that language through the presentation, through almost the offering of the sacrum or the sacrifice of the votive photograph to time. And to do this work of time… is the transcendental movement that transcends time and place in history through active engagement with time and place in history. It's the votive sacrifice of the photographic object to the chemical powers of time which then itself creates, regenerates, and rebirths a historical artifact and object, which is absolutely and utterly transcendental because it reveals the essence and nature of time through, in, and as the artifact itself — which then is claimed by time as primary author.

So you can see, obviously, the original photographic artifact.

22:53

But then furthermore, what you are given is you are given the nature and character and essence of time, the signature of time as the redoubled and profound reconfiguration of the photographic art object through the paintbrush of time, the work of time, which is a work of the chemical paintbrush upon the stone — which is the regenerative impulse of light and the environment of light and heat and humidity, the ecosystem which reconfigures and transfigures the object into something that has profound existential power that otherwise… if it were perfectly preserved and hidden away from time in a lockbox, so to speak, it would not have the ability to develop the exposure which is the revelation of this sort of hidden secret key of the universe, which is then presented to us in a material, imagistic, and visual way, which is a translation in our ability to have a direct encounter with the most profound and sacral movement, which otherwise occurs imperceptibly in a glacial way, right?

125 years into the future, you're given this revelation of 125 years of the work of cosmic, ecosystemic light and heat upon a physical material body, which is chemically volatile and thus allows for the transfiguration of the image, for the lock of the image to be turned and reveal the existential, essential breath of the universe. And so this early chemical silver gelatin photography is a sort of votive sacrificed time, whether or not that was known in the moment in terms of that technology.

24:53

But this was a highly revolutionary technology in terms of being able to render accurate historical images. So then what you're doing is these images themselves are not necessarily interpretive other than through the subjective lens through which they are generated. That's not necessarily an interpretive impulse as such as you would commonly see in art. These are direct documentary historical photographs.

In doing so, right, in that allowance of that social realistic history to emerge through the image generating technology of the photograph, you are centering, right, again, unconsciously, especially in Cuba, through the work of the ecosystemic, environmental, economic, political instability, which is the climate of Cuba as a nation and as a region in space and time in the 1900s… you're allowing for the art of time to take the fore and as such allow for the richness of the historical content and context of the object to remain and to be present and to ground the object in the material center of its origin and of its meaning, but then to gain this existentially transcendental layer — which is the revelation of universal time, transcendental time, eternal time, through the rooting of this material ground of the object in space-time and in its particular context.

The Cuban photography in particular is such a rich example of this, precisely for the reasons just stated.

So we're hitting it there. I hope you enjoyed this, and I'll talk to you on the next one.

SUFFIX:

Image theory: the spiritual evolution of perception

Apr 02, 2025

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Welcome.

This is going to be a very fundamental metaphysical essay through lecture. It's really going to get to the center and root of the idea of the image as a sort of assembly. The way it's been conceptualized most clearly, I think, historically, is in the ancient Hindu and Vedic tradition, through Maya, this idea of the veil or the illusion of reality or samsara. And we will trace that veil all the way up through the Lascaux Caves to painting and Picasso and things like that as well as industrial production of the image.

And I'll actually point to that through American baseball cards. That's going to be really the big thing there. We'll talk about Toulouse Lautrec a little bit too; the creation of mass printing that was distributed publicly. But the essential thing that I want to get to here is a metaphysical revelation of the image in scientific terms, which means what we're really talking about when you see things or perceive something, there's a neurological, biochemical wiring and a feedback loop that's occurring sensorially in the body, which is convincing us of a perceived or perceptible reality based on the needs of the species at a microscopic level. And what I mean by microscopic is bacterial.

So when we talk about bacterial culture or culture as bacteria, it's the idea that an environment has been colonized to operate in a specific way. So bacteria, like fungi, it's a form of language that communicates through itself. Every single species level organism has its own bio linguistics. It has a feedback loop.

There's a series of chemicals that communicate with the body. It is that simple. In terms of hormones that differentiate sex within species. Things along those lines. There's a biochemical makeup that's actually a genetic makeup, which is the language or the alphabet of nature insofar as it exists on Earth. There could be a radically different genetic code or some other form of building; other building blocks in other galaxies or other locations unknown in the universe where nature at large as a meta structural concept and construct communicates with itself.

So when we talk about Maya as an image, we are perceiving a reality which we believe to be real. It's a tree or it's a stone. But in actuality, it's actually a very, very, very complex microbiotic system that is built up through molecules and elements. We're talking about the elemental building blocks of nature, which if you want to take it from the Big Bang level, is the fusionary explosion of stars in real time. This is the generation of the furnace through which the basic building blocks and elements of the universe are produced. All of those building blocks at an elemental level and a molecular level are generated through the fusion of these massive stellar furnaces, of which the universe is a macrocosm of and stars are microcosms of. This can be traced all the way back down metabolically through humans, animals, plant life, cellular life, and so forth.

The concept of photosynthesis or metabolism. These are all ways of the self reference of the universe in fractal form. That's what Maya is realistically: that what we're really dealing with is a primary generator. I've called it resonators in other works of mine because it's like a nesting doll effect of furnaces that are self referential and deferential ultimately to the universal structure itself. You could call it the sun at a solar system level or then you could say the Big Bang at the universal level. It's just through space and though time, the same fundamental principle applies.

It's the eternal. Heraclitus said the universe is composed of fire. From fire into fire. So with Maya, what we're talking about is the vision of the real, which Blake said would be melted away with, salutary medicinal or a chemical that would reveal what was hid: the eternal.

Man sees through narrow chinks in his cavern. This is the famous doors of perception quote. So what we're talking about with image culture is that we are attempting to peel back what was hid. Most people or humans or organisms perceive superficially. You see a tree, you think it's a tree. You see a human, it's a human, and we have names and definitions. It's all very convenient linguistically. And so you live in this illusion. You're living in a veil; in what Plato called the cave, his famous philosophical concept. The cave is everything is what it is as it is, how we see it. And we fail to examine the human perceptual mechanism itself.

This is a sensorium that has been built for the sole purpose to continue the human species and to survive as an organism in the dominion and wilds of nature proper. It's something that you take for granted because you live in this animal mode of perception, through which everything is perceived through the lens of survival. What do I need? What do I need to accumulate in order to survive to the next day? That's the story. And so that's how we see. We say, oh, this is valuable because other people have decided it's valuable, which is really just a mask for me to say: this is meaningful because it'll help me survive to say it's meaningful. Right? It’s a closed loop of biological integrity.

So this is the whole delusion. And this is what we're getting out of here with real image theory. Image theory that functions at the metaphysical substrate of reality.

Human image culture has existed for as long as we're all aware. Even the idea of language and letters and an alphabet, hieroglyphs. The Lascaux Caves. This is all a way that nature reflects upon itself through mirrors. This is actually really profound. There is the reality, which is the kind of substratum of the cosmic fire, as Heraclitus would put it. It's the Big Bang after the Big Bang that happens on scales. It's scalar down through stars, through humans, through animals, plants: that's metabolic fusion that's occurring across scales. And that's the appearance of time through entropy.

Things are born and then they die. They burn out, and then they are resurrected through elemental clouds, which in the case of stars, right, it recollects itself from the ashes of what was and births a new star. So there's this death and rebirth cycle that you can see in the cosmic mythologies of all cultures, whether it's the Mayans or the Aztecs or through Dionysus or Osiris. Or you have Christ.

It's just describing the fundamental metaphysical principle of being over and over and over again. So the idea behind the image at a metaphysical level is actually to penetrate to the deepest and deeper levels of reality to perceive the elemental, to perceive the essential through the revelation of the image as something that's distorted or a veil, or a kind of menagerie of falsities through which we engage on a day to day basis. It's everyday life. It's just a surface.

The same things happen. Reproduction, consumption, digestion, expulsion, and then resorption again, right, it cycles through nature. It's reabsorbed into the earth or the ground or the metaphysical substrate of the void and then is recreated through a process of transformation of the bare elemental bones of existence. Plato's cave is a great analogy because it refers to Lascaux, right, a physical-metaphysical way of bridge. Because in that cave, Lascaux, it's the way of reproducing reality through an interpreted image. It's the symbolic dimension of reality. This is the same way that archetypes function in everyday life. You have a role that a certain actor plays to further the narrative of the cosmos, which is ultimately always self revelation. It's a spurring on; a urging forth, through the dream-mirror reflection of the image.

There's been an issue with images historically. You can go to the concept of iconomachy; then also image worship. Cultures and religions create images to worship and deify as symbols of the divine, of power, of creation, et cetera. And then, obviously, other cultures have their images, and so it's an image war based on appearances. You’re fighting a battle of shadows and light, a chiaroscuro of image dominance which is predicated fundamentally on false perception at an imagistic level, regardless of whose narrative surfaces to sculpt the narratives and stories at large.

You could refer to this through ethnicity or all of these different constructs where people are debating what is real. The issue is it's all on the surface. It's not metaphysical. It's not backed by science, and it doesn't see the fractal, scalar relationship of reality down through these very, very deep metaphysical substrates, which ultimately are creative fire manifest in various different forms, all of which are illusions in the sense that they're images of the thing itself. They're representations. So when people talk about god or the godhead, everything is an image or representation of the godhead through the scalar dimension of energy transformation and transfer. It's a form of limited vision being manifest linguistically. This is, literally speaking, the transmission of belief and belief systems as a virus of delusion.

We experience this through the chaos of dreams in particular and imagination because we can see all of these possible realities. And what all possible realities ultimately are are stand ins. They're conceptual stand-ins for the real. So we could live any sort of life in dreams and in the imagination of the ideal as a thought form.

Humanity could be transformed and is transformed through evolution. It's essentially an alchemical beaker that the universe fundamentally is. That things are transformed through chaos and different interacting forces within the beaker of elemental nature itself at a cosmological level. The interaction and engagement of compound elemental structures.

And so we move through dreams. We move through the illusion of the real. All that we see or seem is a dream within a dream, Edgar Allan Poe. That's a good one. We move through that seeming with images, with words and language. These are all ways that we attempt to refer to reality without directly seeing or perceiving it, but through the veil or adjuncture of the real which is the human experience in the form and body of genus and species, genesis and perception therein from the bio-chemical makeup and imperatives that constitute this specific order of experience.

I call a chair a chair, but it's never been a chair and it never will be. It's the metaphysical substratum of existence, existing on a specific scalar plane, has a certain resonance, a certain frequency, and a certain vibration through which its existence is stabilized. All of this is very tenuous. It's based on molecular agreements and cellular agreements.

And those agreements can be broken, again, through fire, primarily, as the creationary and destructive force that effectively straddles the bounds of reality. Things either exist or don't exist based on their status in fire. That's why you hear, walk through the fire of revelation. Everything is stripped away except the essential. That's just scientific. It's fundamentally scientific, communicated in the language of biblical, Christic revelation.

The issue is that we are referring to things through our perception. It's the narcissistic selfishness that characterizes a species or an organism. Because, of course, it's a survival concern, fundamentally, because nature has to further itself through the language of the organism. That's the genes; the genetic code of the organism, and that has to interface with another aspect or dimension of reality in order to create a third. Again, tripartite, father, son, holy ghost, metaphysical concepts that gesture toward the production and reproduction of being in time; the image in the eternal flow of existence itself. Plato, time is a moving image of eternity. Becoming is, in the language of modernity, a rapidly accelerating industrial reproduction of the image of being, refracted and reflected in increasingly more abstract and technologically hyperspeed concepts and theories of forms.

What happened, in the early nineteen hundreds in particular – this is why, baseball cards are actually really important, as well as artists like Toulouse Lautrec – image culture that was created by lithography and mass printing allowed for, for the first time really in human history, a mass proliferation of images and image culture in a way that democratized accessibility of images, where previously they were available primarily to elites. High art, technically proficient images that absorbed and enraptured and revealed – they were commissioned portraits, paintings, sculptures – whether it was by the Medicis or by kings and royalty in ages past. It is a lapse that almost directly refers to the democratization of image creation that was kind of native to early civilization as a common language.

These were images, as in Lascaux and other such geological locations, that were just created by creativity of human beings and humanity attempting to primarily understand nature through the mediation of a symbol. This is the idea that fine art finally becomes self-resorbed or reabsorbed into the masses by way of print culture. Again, Toulouse Lautrec and public prints, Japanese Ukiyo-e, as well as, the really important part, baseball cards. Baseball cards were objects of possession that were mass produced. And they were not directly referential to reality as in photography. They were produced via dot matrices. Which again, that is a very important aspect, the dot matrix, because what that is is it's a technological encoding of the imagistic dimension, which actually mimics the language of nature. So you can see: in the creation of pixelation, which is, the way you would be viewing this lecture, if you were viewing it, you would be viewing it through the digestion and incorporation of my image in a digital image transfer of that image into pixelated form as an avatar, a digital moving symbolism.

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This is a way of encoding reality that directly mimics actually at a biological molecular cellular level the way that nature adheres and coheres forms, in terms of Maya. The issue is that this veil has been doubly reified by modern technology and the mass production and consumption of images as itself the culture of technological modernity. So when you have mass technologies, cell phones, screens, portable devices – all of which are constantly casting images at you, what it is is essentially a form of the magic of the redoubled obscuration. We're working with images as self referential devices to move through reality to ultimately grasp and perceive the fundamental or the essential. Technology reifies that through the additional interlocution beyond the primary symbolism and codex of nature as a child of nature through the child of nature, mankind, as in an abstracted reproduction, through lithium and pixelated code to generate imagistic outcomes – a mirror within a mirror.

The issue here is that you can get lost in that journey. So it makes me think of Odysseus and the Odyssey. You can get so lost in images and caught up in images as a way of perceiving reality. You're so dependent on that medium. I have to look at a tree to know that there's a tree there and maybe there's fruits and apples and berries on it. Then I know, okay. I can go pick those and then I can survive until the next day. That's already built in at a deep primordial biological level into humanity and into organisms themselves as a visual culture. And this is something that Jim Morrison as philosopher and poet explored pretty substantially in terms of the idea that humanity is essentially a spectator. It's wandering – a species of wandering eyes.

And that nature itself is too. You can see this in terms of the idea of the all seeing eye or the godhead – that there's a primordial objectivity that's functioning and operating through all subjectivities. It's attempting to reveal itself to itself; its hidden sacral commonalities. But the problem is there's been all of these obscurations, and you can see this in the story of Pistis Sophia. It's an obscure Gnostic text. The idea is that Sophia – or wisdom or truth or true sight – or the divine, the diviner has fallen through veils. This is the idea of The Fall in biblical terms: that we've fallen through these veils of perception, and we've been seated in these forms that we essentially are functioning belief systems to further the essential form itself. It's a costume, or a disguise of the eternal, the sacral, cosmic nature itself within the mask of the human. But what's essential is to get back to native sight, which is real primordial sight and vision of the eternal.

This is a concept that is imperative through Blake; through Jim Morrison as well. Through Plato. Right? This is the history of Western metaphysics, just as much as it is the history of Egyptian metaphysics, which is, ultimately, the inheritance of Western metaphysics itself.

So we're working with images. It's a kind of soul work. And what I mean by soul is it's just the self of the universe. That the soul is seeded in a thousand different shards, in fragments. Again, this is a Gnostic concept. Through the, let's say, the Big Bang or the essential primordial force of creation, that's all seeded down in this scalar infrastructure of creation itself. That's what souls are in relation to spirit, which is the eternal – the fundamental, the essence. So soul is on a journey back to spirit. Soul is seeded into the ground, and it is on a journey back to the fundamental perception of the spirit, or the godhead or the eternal. We're using images to do that because, essentially, once things are seeded into forms, there's all of these false differentiations which are ultimately true for the purpose of life to exist and further itself in terms of an increased level of metaphysical perception of the substrate of reality. We must go down and within to perceive the totality of the whole infrastructure of creation itself. To achieve reality we must reveal it through itself as a creation.

The purpose of life, to survive. Granted. But beyond that, it is to perceive the real, to perceive the fundamental or to perceive the essence. So what what we're doing here in terms of evolution, whether you say cosmic evolution, biological evolution, or inserted framework – we are on a journey back to the godhead as in embodiment of the godhead through perception where we are natively reunited, as in Dionysus, Osiris, Christ – with the godhead, and we directly embody the godhead as in embodied revelation of the real. So it's a total unity of the paradox between spirit and form seated in the body. We're on that journey through images.

So we see something. It's reflecting something back to us that we believe to be, but it actually isn't or it's more, or it's less than that. It's this journey of a maze or a labyrinth of mirrors, which is distorted perception. And the purpose is to clarify perception. This is archetypal heroism of the image journey. Again, you have the different journeys, like the Ayahuasca image journey or the mushroom image journey or the image journeys of the ancient Greeks. The Orphic journeys, the Eleusis journeys.

They're all the same thing. The issue is we're just not seeing that. This is the journey of the archetypal hero, whether you want to say it's Hercules or Perseus. Those are two of some of the best ones to help elucidate this. Perseus' shield is a reflector or a refractor of the real. It’s the image, the screen, the veil of the representation through which he perceives the real. Because the real is so hard to comprehend and it’s, for a lot of people, so deeply terrifying. Because what it reveals is all of the terror and the lies and the falsity that was hidden beneath the veil that we use to justify the survival of the species. To justify and perpetuate survival. It’s the darkness of the primordial violence of existence, creation, blood; sex and war.

We had to survive to get to the point to perceive the real. That's what evolution is. We're evolving from single celled organisms and fish that were living in the dark of the ocean, to having higher level abstract perception and conceptualization of the real through forebrain faculties of engagement. We can contemplate metaphysics or quantum mechanics, and we have to understand how the spiritual relates to the physical. That's the process. And humanity is currently in the stage of trying to figure that out. We'll see how that goes.

Navigating the underworld of images to symbolize the deep primordial unconsciousness of the ancestral heritage of mankind and humanity. Yeah. There's a good one. Because in dreams, or in reality, the great Nietzsche quote is that man is a tightrope between animal and god. We are evolving from a deep primordial substratum of unconsciousness. Right? We just didn't know. We don't know. It's pure violence. It's pure chaos. It's pure survival. It sucks. It's a horrible way to live. But we're evolving from that into real-perception, into consciousness. The development of the hindbrain being something rough. Yeah? Hard to go through. Development of the frontal lobes and the forebrain. Great. Logic, reason, rationality, age of enlightenment. Right? We're moving toward this. That's the entire story of history. It's the entire story of nature. It's the entire story of the cosmos. It’s the entire story of mankind.

It's revelation through evolution, cosmic spiritual evolution. And that's what evolution is. I mean, you could call it progress. You can call it whatever you want, but it is toward the perception of the real and the reuniting of the spiritual fragment of the self in biological form or guise, disguise or clothes. That's a great Einstein quote – we're stars seated in chemical garments or something like that. Great quote. Because it directly references this, and it talks about this in a real way. The greatest scientists of this time, which is the revolutionary time of quantum physics, striving toward the understanding of the spiritual dimension of the material. The inner substratum; the metaphysical functioning; the inner metaphysical law of the Newtonian, Copernican world – of what was previously hid. There's a certain point that we get to with science where we are in a state of spiritual revelation. We're in direct contact with god or spirit or source.

It's this veil of the screen in front of us at all times. They are energy containers and transformers because they alter our psychic relationship interdimensionally between our inner world and our inner space and the outer world and how we function in the physical dimension. And the idea is to unite those two poles. The inner and the outer, the within and without, all of these binary dynamics of fissionary selfhood that ultimately veil us from the truth – self, other. And that's a hard thing to do in full from the seat in which humanity sits. So we're using screens as a way of hyper accelerating that feedback loot, feedback loop. Loot is kind of funny there. Because we're looking for the real spiritual wealth. The issue is we get so distorted. All this gold that's in front of me that looks amazing and it's shiny, or the screen that's in front of me that looks amazing, and I can see everything that I want on it.

We mistake that desired desire image or that relationship between the thing that we perceive or we think that we perceive, to be the truth. Because we want it to be from where we sit in the narrative structure of the cosmological unfolding of reality seeded and seated in information forms – biochemical narratives wrapped into futurities by genes. But in reality, right, we're trying to look deeper. We need to look deeper to understand the fundamental reality and thus reunite with the truth itself as the whole. Right? It's less of the hoard or the gold or the thing that I have that nobody else has. Its the thing that everybody and everything fundamentally is.

We're working through these ancestral, primordial dynamics of accumulation and possession into a real perception of the real, which then dramatically alters the course of history, and we're ushered into a new era. And this new era is the era of communion. Communion with source; that radically changes politics, culture, and society as it were.

Let’s see here in the notes… simulation as a ladder to the perception of the real. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes by Shankara, a great Hindu mystic. It's this idea that Maya, or Samsara, or the illusion – it’s a gymnasium. It's a way that we become strong. We work in images as a dimension of play. Images themselves function as a way that we can create relationship in order to come to perception and apperception of the real as a totality. It’s a ping pong ball, or a bouncing off of light.

There's this cycle of attraction and repulsion. This is magnetism and gravity to the psychic dimension. There's images that we want. There's images that we don't want. We’re pulled toward and away from perceived polarities of desire and repulsion. And then we integrate image itself as a construct. Then there are no more images. It's a totality of lived perception.

This is how we function with images; we're constantly in that way constellating self through image. What do I look like? Who do I want to be? What do I want to look like? What do I want in my life, and what does that look like?

The entire process of painting has transformed from an attempt to create real imagistic representation of the real to a fracture, which is probably best symbolized in cubism, Duchamp and Picasso. This idea that the image is broken in modernity, and we're breaking from this attempt to depict reality directly. We think we're directly perceiving the real, but, really, there's this more complex internal environment that dictates and constructs perception, which is probably more real than reality itself as an imagistic representation because how could you possibly truly perceive the real but through a vision of it?

I didn't go into the baseball card stuff that much, but I do think it's very important here. You talk about the industrial engine of America at the outset of the nineteen hundreds. What you're really talking about there is the mass production of images and the mass production of image culture. You have Hollywood and early cinema. But that's not something that's possessed or that's owned by individuals as an image. It's something that's distributed publicly through screens and theatre culture, a la the Roman and Greek theatres of drama. It's being mediated by a complex that is not hyperphysical, such as a card or a print. What baseball cards are in the context of an emergent industrial modernity, and this is why they're important in the historical relationship of what we're talking about here – is that you could basically go from Lascaux to the baseball card and have a coherent field of the revelation and revolution of the image and image culture to a closed loop. And the reason for that is, until the baseball card, there's no real mass produced, fine art image – which is to say, a very artisanal image-object that actually straddles the balance between the real and the hyperreal as in a cartoon or a drawing. Something that's crafted by a technician with the technology of the image that creates a window or a bridge from what is usually conceived of as traditional representation, which is a Victorian or even a Renaissance era stylistic image – which is attempting to use ‘the real’ as a reference or attempting to use the real as a bridge to the symbolic or metaphysical.

These are tobacco or caramel cards made by American Tobacco or American Caramel produced from 1909-1911. These companies were highly resourced and highly powered industrial forces that used mass image generation and reproduction to sell their products. They're really interesting at a technical level, which in itself is remarkable in an art historical context. And through that interlocution of the technological modern industrial image revolution and world power forces of industry, you get this really critical and crucial turning point. You can look at the way dot matrices were used in these mass lithographic forms in industrial reproduction as a way to easily reproduce and technologically replicate images at scale. And you can see, again, through the pixelation of these early modern images, exactly how they were generated by machine stamp of basic color code in relational dot matrices. It's a direct technological-historical reference moment to the modern portable phone, or modern portable screen – not only in terms of the ability to hold this piece of technology in your hands, but actually in how it was produced in terms of pixelation and rendering; in terms of the actual coding and codedness of the image as a technological device.

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This was very different than the glass negative production and reproduction that characterizes early photography in terms of light transfer between mediums. It is a direct interface with a totally technologized form of reality construction and image making. It is a step forward into an unknown, which over the span of the next hundred years culminates and continues to develop through the pixelation of the images on the screen and using technological code therein to generate simulated and increasingly real-world-bridged outcomes through the mediation of technological devices and coding. And that kind of image generation is a pretty radical break from the human. Introducing technological modernity, it's almost like you have space-time folding over on itself. And what happens is humanity as a representation of the real, as a form that's attempting to seek the real itself, to realize and to truly see itself for what it is at root and fundament, creates an entirely new genre through itself, which is technology; which is automation, which is artificial intelligence – that is, it introduces another level of stratification through which the real is perceiving itself. It is the birth of ‘unnatural nature’, or a rupture in the fabric of consciousness itself as a biologically emergent form. It is primary, artistic creation interfacing with the raw materials and elements of nature to build metal machines which can process information and produce and reproduce outcomes; outputs from, again, the raw form.

So you have the godhead spirit, you have human, and then you have technology, which is the birth of this generative device, this further level of Maya through the play of light; through the play of light in a screen or through the play of light in a photograph. And this is really powerful, because it creates this really interesting kind of third dynamic which complexifies the initial mystical relationship between the interface of the screen of reality or the illusion of reality and the sense body. What I think I'm perceiving or what I'm perceiving as I examine the world as a natural form, or the body of Nature proper. It creates another dimension. We're using a technological device to create another projection of the real from this initial schism of perception; we’re using this as a hyperspace of alteration of what we are perceiving; as a sort of tabula rasa for image generation and perception. It is a way of control and manipulation to radically accelerate the awakening of humanity.

This all can be radically changed immediately and directly through the hyperspeed of an internet connection. We can change the way that the screen appears. Right? And so it's this kind of dream narrative that's informing us and that we are rapidly informing through the processing powers of increasingly outsize supercomputers with increasingly broadening apertures of generative, imaginative capacity. And, obviously, you can see how addicting these technologies have become – because the addiction to it is, it’s this ability to achieve hyperspace with image relationship. It's a quantum accelerator of spiritual revelation; therein, species evolution.

It's radically transforming the consciousness of the species at large in a way that the slower, more regular, seasonal, cultivated and measured reality of nature itself can't and doesn't necessarily accomplish. Evolution in a natural sense is glacial, but in a technological sense, it's instantaneous. And, that, historically, has been the function of art. It's to create an apocalyptic revelation. A psychedelic revelation and psychedelic just means psyche-revealing. To reveal the psyche through the production of the image or the consumption, the digestion; the encounter with the image – which reveals. Fundamentally, psyche-revealing is the revealing of the deeper substratum of reality proper.

So a real psychedelic revelation is the stripping away of all illusion – through fire, by fire, and a direct revelation of the fire unto itself, through itself. And this is well documented in all mystical traditions by all mystics, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart. This is in Dostoevsky. This is what real mystical and spiritual encounters are. It's the burning bush. It's the voice of God. In a prophetic sense. And so what's happening at a species level, just to make this really simple, is the mass hyper acceleration of images through technology over the past hundred years, exponentially detonating in increasingly smaller pockets and windows of time. And the spiritual metabolism of this process at a species level is a chaos level exit velocity.

Let's put it right around 1900, a little less for photos and, you know, early cinema. The mass acceleration of images through industrialization. This is the real important thing. It's about survival at a practical level. Right? But this is about the metaphysical transformation of the consciousness of humanity. It's the spiritual stakes of evolution, creation, and existence proper at a universal, utterly macrocosmic scale.

What's at stake is a revelation of the real and then, accordingly, a paradigm shifting, paradigm altering transformation of the species itself in that direct encounter with the real, which is the stripping away and the revelation of the monster – which is the primordial fire of the universe in a scalar form, and then the void that's behind it or the emptiness. It's creation, almost creation for creation's sake, and you don't know why other than to create increasingly direct revelations of the truth behind everything in an eternal sense; in a timeless, spaceless sense. To reveal what was hid. And that kind of mystical revelation tends to be hard to metabolize for any species. Animals who evolve to peer behind the veil. Again, right, when we talk about the hero's journey or Hercules or Perseus, these are labors and trials through which consciousness ascends. It's not always a clean road. It can get a little bumpy. So this mass hyper acceleration is a conflict of consciousness at a scale which we've never even been remotely close to before, in terms of the species level.

Simply to examine the way that the population of the species of humanity on the earth has exploded since the eighteen hundreds, nonetheless, early nineteen hundreds. And that is solely due to technology. Again, right, what it's doing is expanding the species in a physical sense, but also in a metaphysical sense in terms of exposure to the substratum of reality in the hyper acceleration of images, image culture, and image production.

That's the really crucial part because images have always been the way in which we've perceived the world. We've always attempted to understand primarily visually because it's a safety of distance of conceptualization. This gives the given organism the space to metabolize immediate, direct, unmediated bodily experience from the sensorium. It is the space of analysis and the digestion of life experience to accordingly optimize it and thus better survive the onslaught of existence as a summons of being forth into the grips of time. Drill that down and create ever faster methods to consume and produce images, what you've done is you've actually hyper accelerated the evolution species because it's a code that needs to be cracked. Right? We're consuming images all of the time: we're looking at a tree, we're looking at food, we're looking at dreams. Even in dream time.

Again, dream time is entirely imagistic. It's the production and consumption of images in an internal interior way that actually most resembles the artist or the mystic. It's the realm of artists and mystics. It's entirely distilled. Directly accessed. There is no medium; it's a direct channel. Thus, as in the artist and mystic, it is direct creation; the direct access to the stream of creation itself proper. All of surrealism, all of imaginative creative literature; the entire history of human culture is generated through dream time. It's the interfacing of the inner world with the outer. It's a constant, constant, influx of images. You hyper accelerate that externally by way of chemical intake to change the internal environment to accelerate the processing unit or by way of crafting telescopes, microscopes, image generation devices – which allow us to see further, deeper, and faster than ever before. You keep pressing; you keep asserting, asserting, and asserting the code. Eventually, the code breaks and is broken by those who are capable. And I think everyone's really capable.

But it's a question of seeing beyond the veil of the things as they seem. All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream. You have to see the way that sight functions itself. And that we're very convinced that there's all of these different things. But what connects them? So it's that level of inquiry that is this particular to historical minds like da Vinci or even Poe. Interesting figure, you know, who's made an appearance here. Da Vinci said learn how to see; realize that everything connects to everything else. And this is where we're headed. We're headed towards the real. A revelation of the real in full and at sum. And that's what singularity really is and represents in a metaphysical sense. It's less about the collapse of any sort of physical conditions. It's about the psychological, spiritual revelation of the hidden inner unity of existence itself. And that's kind of a high stakes. You know? Because when you see that, now what?

What’s going to change? What needs to change?

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